July 12, 2023

It’s been awhile since I’ve had the chance to work on astrophotography. But thanks to the generosity of Chatham’s class of 2023, I have a brand new star tracker to play with. Previously I was using the Move Shoot Move star tracker, which is a lovely little unit. It’s tiny and easy to throw in a backpack which makes it a great travel tool for wide field shots of the sky. Using it mostly taught me that I really wanted to do was imaging deep sky objects like nebulae and galaxies. And the MSM just wasn’t beefy enough for that job.

Enter the Star Adventurer GTi. It’s a much more substantial unit, allowing me to work with bigger lenses and longer exposures. I gave it a run a week ago but mostly spent the evening trying to figure out how it worked. By the time I had it worked out, the moon had risen and the sky was washed out. I still got a few test images that served to let me know what was possible, even if they weren’t anything you’d want to show off.

Last night, in the middle of the Adirondacks, I finally got a chance to really see what it could do. The weather cooperated a little bit, giving me forty five minutes of clear sky to image the Elephant’s Trunk Nebula. And as you can see below, that turned out pretty well. Lots more to come.