I had to choose between a cheap tracker and saving for a real mount

For about a year, I was stuck trying to get good shots of the Orion Nebula with just my camera on a tripod. The star trails were a mess after 10 seconds. I had $200 saved and saw a basic 'star tracker' for that price, but everyone online said to save $600 for a proper equatorial mount. I went with the cheap tracker. It was a fight every single time. I spent three cold nights in my backyard just trying to get it polar aligned close enough for a 60 second shot. The gears were loud and it would sometimes just stop. I finally got one decent image, but it took hours of stacking to fix the tracking errors. Honestly, I wish I had just waited and saved the extra cash. Has anyone else tried to make a budget tracker work and just gotten fed up with it?

3 comments

3 Comments

jamie_webb672mo ago

Man that sounds like a total nightmare. Did you ever try the old trick of using a really bright star to get your alignment, instead of Polaris? I had to do that with my first cheap tracker and it saved me a bit of headache, but yeah, they're still so fiddly. You end up spending the whole night fixing the gear instead of looking up.

blakestone2mo ago

That "fight every single time" feeling is so real. I had the same battle with a cheap tracker and it just killed the fun for me. Sometimes the right tool really is worth the wait.

owens.anthony2mo ago

Yeah, exactly! I get what @blakestone is saying, but for me it's less about waiting for the "right" tool and more about finding one that just works without the fuss. That cheap tracker probably had bad software or a weak connection, which is a different problem. A good tool doesn't need to be expensive, it just needs to be reliable so you can forget about it and actually enjoy the activity. The fight isn't about price, it's about things not doing their one job well. That's what kills the fun for me every single time.