Sky-Watcher Star Adventurer 2i Pro Pack – Motorized Dslr Night Sky Tracker Equatorial Mount for Portable Nightscapes, Time-Lapse and Panoramas – Wi-Fi App Camera Control – Long Exposure Imaging

Product Information

If you have still to decide whether it would be a good buy for you, I invite you to read our in-depth review of the Star Adventurer first. Some of my astrophotography images that I took with the Star Adventurer. Get To Know Your Star Adventurer

The Star Adventurer has a port for auto guiding. I haven’t used this function myself for two reasons: Earth revolves once every 24hrs (give or take), thus every 15° of longitude from the Standard Meridian of Greenwich (London) there is a LSTM for a time zone: this defines the Universal Time (UT) or Standard Time. This world map shows the different LSTM each 15° of longitude from the meridian of Greenwich and how this is correlated to the Universal Time. (Image credit: Journeynorth)Here is a look at the body of the mount. This helpful diagram can be found in the Sky-Watcher Star Adventurer Pro manual (PDF). I have listed all of the numbered areas of the mount below. But they are expensive, big and heavy, and require a power tank to work or, better, to be connected to the power grid. If you’re not careful, with full-grown equatorial mounts, you can soon end up dealing with monsters like this. (Credit: Warren Landis). Tip: A way round this is to polar align at twilight so that you don’t need the polar scope illuminator. See my polar alignment tutorial for more info. Finding Objects in the Sky Then, it’s a matter of moving the azimuth controls from side to side to place the north star in the correct position. Sway your camera on the target, focus, fit the heating strip on the lens and connect the intervalometer.

Mount is so light and very sturdy that it was good enough to hold my RVO 60ED Refractor with RVO 32mm Guidescope with ZWO ASI120MM Guide camera, 0.8x FF/FR, Canon 600D, with Pegasus Astro Buddy power box with a total weight of 3.8Kg, the mount held superbly, with it's 5kg payload, it handled my set-up with ease. Next, let the Polar Scope free to rotate: the Date Graduation Circle will rotate with it. Set the Star Adventurer to Midnight, October 31st, by rotating the Polar Scope until the Date Graduated Circle is aligned to the Time Graduation Circle, as shown in the image below. I've got WIFI working very easily with my old laptop and my smart phone, using the dedicated Synscan Pro App, but you can use any Syscan handset, using the hand controller port as well. These products were created by scanning an original printed edition. Most older books are in scanned image format because original digital layout files never existed or were no longer available from the publisher.To polar align the mount at 3 a.m. of January 31st, in time zone zero, you have to put Polaris on the red cross in the image. Manually adjusting the alt/az bolts on the mount to line up Polaris in the correct spot only takes a minute. This skill will come in handy the next time you set up in a new, dark sky location with minimal gear (trust me). Before heading out under the stars, you must perform a couple of easy tests to ensure the reticle is aligned to both the rotational axis and the Meridian Indicator engraved on the side of the Polar Scope. Testing The Polar Scope’s Reticle Alignment To The Rotational Axis. I was able to take impressive 60-second unguided exposures at this focal length, and with a spot-on polar alignment, I am sure I could even longer. If I were to add a small autoguiding setup, I am confident that 5-minute exposures are absolutely possible. Set the Time Meridian Indicator to 0: hold the Polar Scope and rotate the Date Graduation Circle until the 0 is aligned to the Meridian Indicator (see the previous photo).

The Star Adventurer Mini is the younger sibling of the Star Adventurer Pro. The SAM is even more lightweight than the Pro and is the ideal choice if you’re looking to shoot widefield landscape foreground shots with the Milky Way. To polar align the Star Adventurer Pro, you need to align the latitude wedge with the north or south celestial pole from your geographic location. For me, that means adjusting the altitude control knob so that 43 degrees north is set.

Polar Alignment Process

To do astrophotography, I often need to move as far as 140km away from my place, park the car and walk on trails for 20 minutes before setting up for the night. Now that you know how to frame any point in the sky, you need to know how to find your target. The easiest way to do so is when your target is visible, or it sits “next” to a visible star. Once polar-aligned, we programmed a range of timings using the app with the Canon 50D and its 18–55mm lens set at 18mm.