Vixen Polarie Star Tracker

Product Information

If you use a short focal length lens on your camera it will enable you to take remarkable wide field photos of the Milky Way and other targets. But it you use a longer lens or a small telescope, the alignment becomes more critical. It’s even more of a problem in the Southern Hemisphere, where we are. Inspecting the images in post processing, we only had to exclude 10 frames from the batch taken with the 50mm lens due to elongated or deformed stars.

Vixen has included a table in the user guide indicating recommended exposure limits for various lens focal lengths combined with latitude separation from the equator. My location indicated roughly 2-minute maximums for this combination, but I was unable to go that long using rough polar alignment. I’m sure more careful alignment would get me closer to the recommended limits. These two 15 second exposures are of the same part of the sky. They show the difference between when I had the Polarie running and when it was off. It’s pretty clear that the Polarie stopped most of the apparent motion of the stars. The ones on the right are much more pleasing dots.The Polarie U is a camera mount with which your camera can follow the rotation of the night sky. This makes it possible to take astronomical images with longer exposure times using your camera and a camera lens: wonderfully sharp images of stars, nebulae and the Milky Way! Before I launched on the sequence of exposures, I did a few tests to see if the Polarie was working. This also helped me get the exposure right. I didn’t have high expectations due to the smoke haze. Note that without the counterweight upgrade kit, though, you cannot have the polar scope mounted at the same time with your camera. Performances

The Vixen Polarie is extremely portable. Any usable imaging platform will require a tripod and at least one head. The nature of the beast dictates two heads, unless the head used to mount the Polarie itself is included in the tripod design. The Polarie’s rated weight capacity of only 4.4 pounds puts very little strain on the base platform, so you could certainly get by with a lighter tripod/head combination than the one I used. It's been a year, and I still continue to be impressed by the Polarie. I find that because of its simplicity I manage to make more opportunities to image than I did before with my larger setups. Sometimes simple is best. Here's some of my results, you be the judge.Trying this again with a standard photography ball head proved a little more difficult, so a geared head would be beneficial. xposure finishes. This is useful as a time-lapse rotator so you can create better quality images in every single shot in the day or night. In the box, you will find the Polarie unit and nothing more. This is because most of what you need is built-in or stored in the unit body. What’s Not Included (But Would Be Useful) Conventional telescopic astrophotography photographs a relatively narrow area of the sky. Star-scape photography mainly uses a wide-angle lens and takes impressive photos in which stars, and other celestial targets such as the majestic Milky Way and landscapes are combined. The possibilities of the compositions are endless and a completely new kind of landscape photography opens up.

In common with other ultra-portable mounts of this type, the Polarie only moves in right ascension (RA); there is no declination (dec.) axis as such.four times that of the previous model. This achieves a great improvement in loading capacity successfully in spite of the weight reduction by 20%. * 1 We then attached the optional polar scope that enabled us to refine our polar alignment by visually aligning Polaris and two other stars against the image printed within the polar scope. Second, it’s a pity I didn’t have the Milky Way available. MW shots are brilliant, and to get a really good image would be great. I’ll have to be patient, as MW season is over. Which one should you invest your hard-earned money in for astrophotography? That will depend on the type of user experience you are looking for, and my goal for this article is to highlight the key differences in the user experience for each mount.