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Star Tracker

Submitted by Joshua Elliot on 30 Jan 2023
saru games astrophotography

After months of printing and building, the open astro tracker was finally built. Although not perfect yet, as when taking 3 minute exposures star trails started to form, and it was unable to be polar aligned as it was not fully built yet, the images were decent for 12 (4x 3 minute exposures) and 30 (10x 3 minute exposures) minute exposures respectively.

The next steps will be to properly calibrate the star tracker and get the guider working (the long tube underneath the camera), so that longer exposures can be taken and longer focal lengths can be used without trailing of stars. Once that is completed and everything is calibrated, hopefully I can start to take more detailed and less noisy pictures of our night sky.

Both images were shot on a Nikon Z50 with a 56mm Viltrox F/1.8
(Nikon Z50, F/2.8, ISO 800, 3 Minute Exposure)