A tracker carries a camera and a lens and produces wide-field images that a telescope on a mount frames too tightly to show. A mount carries a telescope. They photograph different things, and the tracker is the cheaper entry by a wide margin.
The two devices are often compared as though one were a smaller version of the other, and they are not.
What a tracker is for
A camera and a lens, turning with the sky. The images are wide — constellations, the Milky Way, large nebulae spanning degrees — and they are the images a telescope cannot frame at all.
What a mount is for
A telescope, which means a long focal length, a small field, and a load that needs real rigidity. Everything about a mount is heavier because of that.
A tracker, a ball head and a lens you may own
A tracker, a ball head, a tripod and a lens you may already own is a fraction of the cost of a mount able to guide a telescope. It is also the setup that fits in hand luggage.
How to decide
List the objects you want to photograph and find their angular size. If most of them are degrees across, buy the tracker. If most of them are minutes across, the tracker will not frame them and the money has to go to a mount.
If this page and the manufacturer’s own documentation disagree, follow the documentation. Every aperture, focal length, payload rating, field, eye relief, transmission figure and thread size on this page comes from the maker’s own published figures, with the unit as printed and the source named. None of it is measured here, and no figure is converted into another convention, because a converted number is a different number. And for any payload figure: makers quote it for observing, and photography asks for a considerably wider margin. A tracking error invisible at the eyepiece is a smeared star on a sensor, and the rating usually excludes the counterweights. This page reports the maker’s figure with the use it was quoted for, and derives no photographic capacity from it.
The questions that keep arriving
Can a tracker carry a small telescope?
Some will, within their payload, and the polar alignment then has to be considerably better because the longer focal length magnifies any error. It is the point at which most owners find the limit of the device.
What limits the exposure length on a tracker?
Polar alignment quality and the focal length of the lens. A wide lens forgives a rough alignment; a long one does not, and the same tracker can manage minutes with one and seconds with the other.
Last reviewed 17 September 2026