Imaging
A camera on a fixed tripod gives a few seconds before stars become streaks. Everything in astrophotography that does not involve a telescope is about extending those few seconds — with something that turns, and with filters that let the exposure run longer under artificial light.
That is the whole problem, and a tracker is the whole answer: a motor, or a spring, that turns the camera at the same rate in the opposite direction. Everything else in this guide exists to make that turning accurate.
A motorised tracker offers programmable rates and a shutter interface; a spring-driven one runs in the cold and never goes flat. Both appear on this site, and the listings publish opposite halves of their specifications.
Everything above the mount counts: body, lens, ball head. A tracker rated to four kilograms is not rated for a four-kilogram lens.
It cannot remove light that shares the spectrum of the subject. Against sodium lighting a narrow filter helps considerably; against white LED lighting, which is broadband, there is much less to cut out without cutting the stars too.
Purely mechanical tracker · 4 kg payload · no batteries
A spring-driven mechanical star tracker for cameras and light telephoto lenses, carrying up to four kilograms and running without any power source at all.
Best for: Wide-field night sky photography on foot, far from any power
≈ €256
Motorised tracker · Wi-Fi and manual control · illuminated polar scope
A motorised photographic tracking mount with Wi-Fi control from a free app, an illuminated polar finder and a DSLR shutter interface for timed sequences.
Best for: Camera-based night sky photography with an alignment routine that is properly supported
≈ €443
Blocks about 580–610 nm · 67 mm camera thread · 28-layer coating
A 67 mm photographic light-pollution filter blocking the 580 to 610 nm region of common artificial lighting, with a 28-layer nano coating on both faces.
Best for: Wide-field tracked photography with a camera lens under sodium-lit skies
≈ £42 / €55
Mechanical tracker · sighting tube instead of an optical polar scope
The entry version of a purely mechanical tracking mount, which replaces the optical polar scope with a simple sighting tube.
Best for: Wide-angle tracked photography where a coarse polar alignment is enough
≈ $222 / €150
Counterweight and threaded shaft · not for the Star Adventurer GTi
A counterweight and threaded shaft kit for the Star Adventurer, explicitly excluding the GTi version, with two mutually inconsistent weight figures.
Best for: A Star Adventurer carrying a lens heavy enough to need balancing
≈ $40 / £44 / €55
It depends on the lens: a wide lens tolerates longer than a telephoto, because a star crosses fewer pixels in the same time. Seconds rather than minutes, in every case.
It points the tracker’s rotation axis at the celestial pole, so its turning matches the sky’s. The closer the match, the longer an exposure can run before stars trail.
It attenuates a narrow region of the spectrum where certain street lighting sits, which lets an exposure run longer before the sky itself washes the frame out. It does nothing about broadband white LED lighting.
Any figure written into the body of this page was true on the day it was written. The amount shown next to each instrument is requested from the retailer as the page loads, and it is that amount, not the text, that stands.
Telescopes and mounts are discounted over and over through the year — hardest of all in the weeks before Christmas, which is exactly when most of them are bought — and a struck-through figure on its own says nothing whatever about what the same model was charged at four weeks ago. UniverTrack keeps a week-by-week record for each retailer, so a discount is measured against a figure somebody genuinely paid instead of one invented for the sale — and it says when the moment to buy has genuinely arrived.
