Hi All, I recently received my AstroTrac for taking long exposures of the night sky. It is a great device and it is not too terribly expensive. I recently got my D800E as well and that is a GREAT camera for astrophotography. Tons of detail of the sky. For info on the astrotrac, go here www.astrotrac.com to get the details. I have the Really Right Stuff BH-40 mid sized ball head (awesome quality) for my camera since I have the "L" bracket on it. The AstroTrac is mounted on a Monfrotto 410 Jr gear head for fine tuning to get the AstrTrac polar aligned. I use the tripod with the legs spread one notch out for more stability. I also use the MC-36 remote to take the long exposures on the camera. It's a great device if you are interested in longer exposures of the night sky and get some land/sky scapes. Here are some photos:
Artscar2 wrote:
Beautiful shots!
Affordable-- relatively. But is it complicated?
Not complicated at all. I can have it set up in 10 minutes or so and it will track for two hours at a time before it has to be reset. It is very easy to use. The polar alignment scope makes it easy, just put Polaris (north star) in the spot designated in the scope and line it up with the big dipper. You may have to realign some as you swing the camera to a different part of the sky as the AstroTrac may shift due to slack in the gear head. However it is not major, not everything is rock solid.
I was checking out the AstroTrac website you pointed to in the first post, and all the information necessary can easily be found. There's a You-Tube video that demonstrates set-up and operation. I also see that it can be ordered from Adorama.
This definitely caught my interest, especially after viewing the Solar Eclipse in Page, AZ last week. There were lots of star-gazers out-n-about with lots of interesting telescopes. I imagine this device would have made tracking the sun during an eclipse easier too, but achieving polar alignment in daylight would be difficult if not impossible.
The Venus transit occurs in a few days (June 5) . . .
Chris Noyes wrote:
I was checking out the AstroTrac website you pointed to in the first post, and all the information necessary can easily be found. There's a You-Tube video that demonstrates set-up and operation. I also see that it can be ordered from Adorama.
This definitely caught my interest, especially after viewing the Solar Eclipse in Page, AZ last week. There were lots of star-gazers out-n-about with lots of interesting telescopes. I imagine this device would have made tracking the sun during an eclipse easier too, but achieving polar alignment in daylight would be difficult if not impossible.
The Venus transit occurs in a few days (June 5) . . . ...Show more →
Yes I forgot about youTube and the many videos they have for it. OPT also sells the AstroTrac, that's Oceanside photo & telescope and they are in southern California. I'm glad to see dealers in the USA as ordering this thing fro the UK may take a while. You could polar align the AstroTrac at night and leave it up all night to use in the daytime, (needs to be a safe place) and cover it with plastic so dew will not get on it. Then you could use it for the transit.... That will be neat.
FortyOneSixty wrote:
I am so confused as to how #5 was taken.
How does the camera rotate with the sky but not the ground?
I see your confusion. I took two separate shots, one of the sky and the ground was blurred, the other was of the ground where the stars were trailed, the two still images were blended together as one. they were both 6 min exposures.
Thanks for the info. .. always want to try these things but Hong Kong is a heavily light polluted city so I could not try that unless I go travel, and I'm not sure if i want to carry that much when I travel.
Would removing the IR filter of the camera helps to make those images even better?
