Hans Vehrenberg

Hans Vehrenberg (born March 6, 1910 in Emden , † August 2, 1991 in Düsseldorf ) was a German tax advisor , lawyer and amateur astronomer who became known in astronomy for his practice-oriented, photographic star atlases .

Life

After studying law, serving in the military, World War II and subsequent imprisonment, Hans Vehrenberg returned to Düsseldorf, where, after the sudden death of his father, he ran the Treugesell publishing house , where he later published his astronomical books. For about a decade he was also the publishing director of Sterne und Weltraum, and ran a mail order business with telescopes and astronomical books.

His first astronomical work was the Falkauer Atlas , a photographic star atlas in 303 sheets of 12 × 12 ° image field each. It was recorded at the beginning of the 1960s with two Zeiss astrographs with 71 / 250mm and 56 / 250mm Tessar optics at Vehrenberg's private observatory in Falkau in the Black Forest and reached up to the 13th star size class. Thanks to its inexpensive but practical equipment, it was used worldwide.

In 1964 Vehrenberg expanded the Falkauer Atlas by 125 images of the southern sky , which he made at the Boyden Observatory in Bloemfontein , South Africa . Some of the "amateur" features of this map series did not leave him in peace, however, and so in 1970 he published the Atlas Stellarum with equinox 1950.0 on a total of 450 maps, recorded with a 120 / 540mm Zeiss Sonnefeld Astrovierlinser . This became a worldwide widespread tool for both amateur and professional astronomers and reached up to the 14th stellar magnitude class.

His most widespread work is " My Messier Book ", which he referred to in later editions - also in English - as the "Atlas of the most beautiful celestial objects". Most of the pictures in this book were taken with a 300/450/1000 mm Schmidt camera , for which Dieter Lichtenknecker made the optics. The later editions were supplemented by some color images that were created with a 356/356/600 mm Schmidt camera.

Further works are the Atlas of Selected Areas , the three-volume work Atlas Galactic Nebula and the Handbook of Constellations as well as a Milky Way photo mosaic and various specialist articles on the subjects of astrophotography and deep sky objects.

Hans Vehrenberg's works are now available again in digital form on DVD.

In 1984 the asteroid (3030) Vehrenberg was named after him.

literature

Works by Hans Vehrenberg in digital form.

• H. Vehrenberg: My Messier book (with another 260 celestial objects). Treugesell-Verlag, Düsseldorf 1970
• K. Schaifers: Hans Vehrenberg † Communications of the Astronomical Society, Vol. 75 (1992), pp. 11–12 (obituary)
• Stellarum
• Günter D. Roth : Memories of Hans Vehrenberg, March 6, 1910 - August 2, 1991 . In: Stars and Space. Volume 30, No. 12, 1991, ISSN  0039-1263 , pp. 766-768

Web links

• Website about Hans Vehrenberg