Motivation
After seeing some beautiful photos of the milky way, I wanted to step up my astrophotography game a little bit. In astrophotography, you are limited to shutter speed = 500 / (focal length) before your stars get blurry from the earth's rotation. To get better photos of the night sky, you can use what is called a tracker which allows you to take much longer exposures.They are also quite expensive, and not particularly complicated. So I decided to try making one myself. The goal was to make it simple, and cheap. In the end, the total was less than $50, and the results have been quite successful.
It was so simple to build in fact, you probably don't even need a guide once you understand the key concepts. So I'll start with the basics of how and why it works, followed by a breakdown of how I built it.
Here is the final product:
and some results:
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| 2.5 minute Milky Way exposure |
