Astrophotography with TTS mountings

- high quality deep sky imaging with no polar alignment

Setup the mounting and start taking serious astrophotos in few minutes

After having delivered high quality instruments mainly for the visual observers for some years, Track The Stars broadened its focus to also cover serious astrophotography.
It is our philosophy to keep things simple and easy for the user of our products. Therefore we have developed compact and stable products that are easy to transport and fast to set-up at dark sky locations. Following the same path we can now offer the astro photographer the same benefits by allowing long exposure precision guided exposures with no polar alignment. The time and worries usually spent on polar aligning a German Equatorial Mounting can now be spent imaging the sky. As the mountings don’t have to flip when passing the meridian imaging right in south where the object are most favorable placed is easier than ever.

Exact Drive – high precission

To improve the TTS-mountings performance as astro-photo platforms we have developed and introduced  the “Exact Drive” system. The Exact Drive system uses a combination of a worm gear and a roller drive. This combination gives improved tracking performance with lower periodic error values and even more important no sudden changes in tracking speed or position jumps as known from many mountings with ordinary worm drives.

Read more about the Exact Drive.

Stacking short exposures – the easy way into astrophotography

In its standard configuration TTS-mountings tracks the stars accurately enough to make exposures of 30 seconds to several minutes depending on the focal length. Due to what is known as field rotation the length of the single exposures is often limited to around 30 seconds. Therefore many (can be hundreds) of single frames are taken and afterwards automatically aligned and stacked. There are several software packages that automates this to a great extend.
Stacking short exposures is the easiest way to do deep sky imaging: 

– no polar alignment, no guiding – just focus and shoot.

Read more about stacking short exposures

High resolution planetary imaging.

High resolution imaging is done with the TTS-mountings in the standard configuration. The mounting will track the planet precisely even at very long focal lengths and the field rotation is so small (due to the small angular diameter of the planet) that the rotation of the planet itself will smear the images before the field rotation is distinguishable. 

Long exposure Deep Sky imaging

The key for taking the best possible astrophotos is to use long exposure time for the individual frames and use lots of them. This will give a high signal to noise ratio leaving room for processing that brings out the subtle details without showing the noise.
Track The Stars has developed a new Telescope Rotator unit that will make it easier than ever to take high quality long exposure astrophotos. The unit integrates completely with the mountings control system and no extra power supplies or computers is needed. The unit is unique because it rotates the entire optical tube assembly enabling the use of piggybacked guide telescopes.

Read more about the new Telescope Rotator

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