First light with Astrotrac – M42 Astrophotography with 5DmkII

So I have finally gotten a chance to go out into the dark of night and try the Astrotrac mount I purchased a long while back. Unfortunately “out into the dark” meant my light polluted city backyard. I look forward to spending some time at dark sites later this year and will get to put this mount through its paces and make some awesome astro-panoramas. In the meant time, I thought I would share what I discovered.

I used a 5DmkII for this image and a 70-200mm lens. I could barely see any stars the night I shot this.I was able to roughly align the mount on Polaris. With that being said…I am amazed at how well the Astrotrac works! For me being unfamiliar with the mount, and not being able to do a full polar alignment, I was able to obtain 3.5 minute long shots with a 50mm lens. At that exposure I had no star trailing at all yet! That makes me incredibly excited about using this mount at a dark site where I can really star to push things up a notch.

I focused my shot on M42, The North American Nebula in the constellation Orion. This image is 35 seconds at ISO 500, F/4 at 200mm. I had to apply some heavy curves to darken my naturally orange sky. I used no filters, nor is my 5DmkII setup for internal astro filtration. This is also one single shot instead of multiple stacked exposures. The light pollution really takes it’s toll on the results.

Regardless, the Astrotrac mount has already show it is highly capable. I am quite impressed I could achieve these results on the first try with such poor alignment. I can’t wait to get some mileage behind this mount! I will have a more thorough review of the mount and setting it up to shoot once I can get to a dark site and make some images!

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My Friday photo posts are designed to be an outlet for images I create for myself outside of my usual work. I encourage people to really play and experiment and do something different in their creative art regularly. You can follow my twitter for more fun images throughout the week.