I’ve been using an Astrotrac mount to capture longer exposures with my Nikon D80. This was a one minute exposure at ISO 400 – not much but the skies were pretty bright from the clouds coming in and anything longer would have blown out the sky.

After two nights of playing with it – one of them with the always helpful Doug Baum over my shoulder – I’m very happy with the Astrotrac. All you have to do is find Polaris and center it in the polar scope, making sure that the arrows pointing at Ursa Major and Cassiopeia are pointing in the right direction, and you are good to go. It took me only a couple of tries to get it down pat and the results as you can see are spectacular. I am seriously in love with this mount.

Update: I’ve created a set of all of my Astrotrac photos on Flickr.

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