Star trackers are a vital tool for long-exposure astrophotography. As a result of the earth’s rotation and low-light conditions, stars can start to appear as trails in a matter of seconds when utilising long exposures.
A star tracker counteracts this movement by tracking the stars when orientated to either the north or south celestial pole, resulting in pin-sharp images even with long exposures.
When choosing a star tracker, the key factors to consider are: portability, payload, functionality and battery life. There are different star trackers for different purposes and this guide will highlight the best option tailored to your specific needs and requirements.
Our top picks
Easy to fit into a camera backpack and relatively quick to set-up, this star tracker is one of the smartest star trackers. When used with modern smartphone technology, this an ideal setup for widefield nightscape images.
Read more below
This is a compact and affordable option for astrophotographers that we'd particularly recommend when travelling to capture your astro images. It allows for long exposures of up to five minutes, is lightweight and can be setup in minutes – thanks to revolutionary laser technology when performing polar alignment.
Read more below
Best for beginners
Not only lightweight and compact, the iOptron SkyTracker Pro is a great choice when familiarising yourself with long exposure astrophotography. This model also includes multiple tracking rates – for stars, 1/2 speed, lunar and solar – so you can utilize the tracker for astronomical events such as eclipses.
Read more below
The Benro Polaris Astro Edition is a ground-breaking design, that uses your smartphone to align to the stars and its build quality is unrivaled among star trackers. Its design includes great functionality – but this makes a more expensive option.
Read more below
The Vixen Optics Polarie is designed to work with wide-angle lenses to image star fields and the Milky Way. Featuring a built-in compass and latitude meter (which are helpfully illuminated in red light), the process of polar alignment is very straightforward
Read more below
Best for deep sky
The iOptron Skyguider Pro can safely support a whopping 5kg, which means a zoom lens or even a (small) telescope can be attached. It has four tracking rates; stars, Sun, Moon, and, as a bonus, a 1/2 speed for motion time-lapses during the day or night
Read more below
Best star trackers for astrophotography
Why you can trust Digital Camera World Our expert reviewers spend hours testing and comparing products and services so you can choose the best for you. Find out how we test.
Best overall
The Sky-Watcher Star Adventurer Mini is one of the most portable star trackers on the market, due to its small size. It's also one of the smartest star trackers around, thanks to its use of smartphone technology. Optimized for lightweight lenses (55mm), our reviewer tried it with a much heavier 24-105mm zoom and got great results.
With your smartphone to hand, the free Star Adventurer Mini Console app on Android or iPhone can perform a polar alignment with the included polarscope and Polar Clock feature, which also allows you to change the speed for time-lapse modes. Alignment is a breeze, making it a suitable option for novice astrophotographers.
The unit is of great quality build. The polarscope has a built-in red light mode that helps to preserve night vision. The platform itself has a built-in intervalometer, so if your DSLR or mirrorless camera doesn’t have one built in you can just attach it to the camera mount.
Around 60-second exposures are achievable using a 100mm lens, though a counterweight is available that ups the load limit to 3kg. The images are very good, and we are impressed with the crystal clear results: we even managed to try a touch of deep-sky astrophotography with a fair outcome.
The Sky-Watcher Star Adventurer Mini can also perform motion time-lapses, plus it uses two AA batteries that can be easily replaced. We recommend keeping some extras in your pocket – to keep them warm and increase battery life – or using the micro USB port to attach an external battery source.
Read more: Sky-Watcher Star Adventurer Mini review for more details
Best for travel
The Move Shoot Move Nomad star tracker is a compact and affordable option for astrophotographers that we'd particularly recommend for travel. It allows for long exposures of up to five minutes by rotating the camera in sync with the Earth's rotation to prevent star trailing.
It's simple to use once set up, and provides reliable performance for exposures up to 3-4 minutes. Battery life is excellent, allowing for up to 5,000 shots.
While the Move Shoot Move is very portable (weighing just 430g), its low weight capacity of 7lbs means it works best with wider lenses rather than heavy telephoto or telescope setups. It's also worth noting that additional accessories like a laser pointer and geared tripod head are required for a more precise polar alignment.
Overall, though, this is a good travel-friendly option for astrophotographers shooting with wide-angle lenses who value portability. However, those with heavier camera setups or deeper astrophotography ambitions may need to look at larger and more expensive star trackers as an alternative.
See our full Move Shoot Move Nomad review
Best for beginners
If you are looking to familiar yourself with long exposure astrophotography and polar alignment, then no further than the iOptron SkyTracker Pro. Compared with the older generation of SkyTracker, the feel of the Pro has significantly improved –and despite iOptron switching out the metal components, the design has been well machined and constructed.
The tracker has a loading capacity of 3kg: and using a DSLR even slightly heavier than this caused the SkyTracker Pro motors to struggle – although the optona l counterbalance will rectify the problem. Be mindful that you won't be able to push the SkyTracker Pro much beyond this capacity – so choose your lenses wisely!
Meanwhile, alignment is performed via a detailed polarscope with an impressive eight brightness levels, as well as a smartphone app (iOptron Polar Scope for iOS and Polar Finder for Android). The app needs to be purchased separately as an extra cost, but alignment is a breeze once installed. The SkyTracker Pro also runs quietly, – no slippage was encountered and the exposures we took provided images with pin-sharp stars.
Something we discovered – and it’s important to note – is that both iOptron products use a platform that can’t handle motion time-lapses. Nevertheless, the SkyTracker offers four tracking rates; stars, 1/2 speed, lunar and solar, so you can be utilized to photograph a wide range of celestial events.
See our full iOptron SkyTracker Pro review
Best smart tracker
The Benro Polaris Astro Edition is easily one of the best star tracker camera mounts for astrophotography available, but it’s also by far the most expensive. Its build quality is unrivaled among star trackers, but in use, it has its fair share of quirks.
It is a ground-breaking design that uses your smartphone to align to the stars – and this is something we hope catches on with other star-tracker brands. For a more accurate alignment, we wonder if two or three-star alignment (which most computerized telescopes use) or plate-solving technology will be included in future updates (as found on smart telescopes) to allow even longer exposures.
As the app develops, we will keep an eye as the Benro Polaris has the potential to be a truly autonomous and easy-to-use star tracker.
Read our full Benro Polaris Astro Edition review for more details
Best for small cameras
The Vixen Polarie is best used for photographing nightscapes and the Milky Way. Featuring a built-in compass and latitude meter (that can be illuminated using the built-in red LED), alignment is very straightforward. You'll need to locate the celestial pole through a sight hole or use a polar scope (sold separately). There’s also a Vixen PF-L Assist phone app for iOS and Android.
Like the iOptron suite of products, the Polarie can track the stars, Sun, and Moon, with a 1/2 speed for motion time-lapses at night. Meanwhile, the overall build is perhaps the best we've ever come across in the star tracker market – especially given the reasonable price tag and performance.
Similar to the Sky-Watcher model, the Polarie runs on two AA batteries. I discovered that the battery life doesn't last as long, limiting use to approximately two hours. However, the results I obtained are superb with pin-sharp stars in our images.
To maximise battery life, I'd recommend connecting the Polarie to a portable battery source using the micro USB port.
With the Polarie, the load is limited to 2.5kg, but it is possible to upgrade the kit with counterweights to a capacity of 6.5kg, making it possible to use 200mm+ lenses. Just make sure that you have a tripod and head that can take the weight of your setup!
See our full Vixen Optics Polarie review
Best for deep sky
The iOptron SkyGuider Pro can safely support a whopping 5kg, which means a zoom lens or even a small telescope can also be attached. As well as making deep-sky shots possible, it has four tracking rates; stars, Sun, Moon, and, as a bonus, a 1/2 speed for motion time-lapses during the day or night.
This star tracker comes with a 1.35kg counterweight and has a built-in shutter triggering port so you don’t need to use an add-on intervalometer. In my field tests, alignment using the SkyGuider Pro system – an electronic polar finder scope known as the iPolar – makes this operation a breeze. If you'd rather use your smartphone for the process though, there’s also an iOptron Polar Scope app for iOS and Polar Finder for Android, to simplify polar alignment.
The built-in rechargeable battery has a decent runtime (though you can also run it off an external powerbank). Results are very impressive, capturing a selection of stars and galaxies, and the operation is both smooth and quiet to operate.
The tracker can be utilised with a secondary camera to act as an autoguider, allowing for greater exposure times. It is worth noting an external device, such as a laptop, may be needed to configure this setup, however this is expected from this choice of tracker design.
See our full iOptron SkyGuider Pro review
FAQs
What is a star tracker?
One of the main challenges with photographing the night sky is that the stars appear to move, or rather, they appear to when captured with a long exposure. The Earth rotates once every 23 hours 56 minutes and 4 seconds – the position of stars appears to move as a result. Using an exposure of just 30 seconds will result in star trailing. This becomes more evident as the stars appear to rotate over the course of a few hours.
So what do you do if you want to shoot the night sky with long shutter speeds over 30 seconds – and as long as four or five minutes – without the effects of trailing? That's where you would use a star tracker, a device you place between the camera and tripod, which, when aligned with the celestial pole (North Celestial Pole in the Northern Hemisphere, or South Celestial Pole in the Southern Hemisphere), will keep your camera in sync with Earth’s rotation.
A star tracker becomes very useful for capturing enough light, color, and detail to reveal the Milky Way, as well as faint celestial sights such as galaxies, nebulae, and even gas and dust clouds.
When shooting close-up deep-sky images, astrophotographers will often strap their cameras with telephoto lenses to telescopes mounted on equatorial mounts; star-trackers like these are all about portability and are best used with a wide-angle lens (which are generally considered the best lenses for astrophotography).
Why do photographers use star trackers?
A slowly moving platform means you'll get sharper and cleaner star fields. This will result in a blurred foreground, so will need to be prepared when blending your images together in post-processing. Both wide-angle and deep-sky astrophotography will not be as crisp until you adopt the use of a tracker so that the shutter can stay open long enough to capture a clean, noise-free image.
Is an astrophotography star tracker and a star tracker app the same?
No. You can get a number of apps for phones which take advantage of the positioning tech to calculate where you are and help show you a live map of the stars – essentially a kind of AR. Apps like GoSkyWatch Planetarium or Star Finder can be a useful tool for astrophotographers too, but the 'star trackers' listed above are devices to help keep the camera pointed at the stars even as the earth rotates so you can keep the shutter open a very long time.
How to choose the best star tracker
When choosing the best star tracker for astrophotography, there are a few key factors to consider. Portability is important, so look for a compact, lightweight model that's easy to transport to remote shooting locations. The weight capacity of the tracker is also crucial, ensuring it can support your camera and lens setup. The accuracy of aligning the tracker with the celestial pole is critical for long exposures, so automated or motorized polar alignment is preferred.
Additionally, longer astrophotography sessions require a star tracker with ample battery life, ideally lasting several hours between charges. Other features to look for include wireless remote control, auto-guiding capabilities, and compatibility with your specific camera and lens. Ultimately, the best star tracker balances performance, portability, and user-friendliness to suit your astrophotography needs.
How we test star trackers
In our testing of star trackers, we evaluate a variety of factors to determine the top picks for astrophotographers. We put the trackers through real-world testing, assessing ease of setup and polar alignment, tracking accuracy over long exposures, camera payload capacity, battery life, portability and overall user-friendliness.
To compare image quality, we capture long-exposure shots with each tracker assess the sharpness and clarity of star fields. Detailed field testing, is necessary to fully assess the performance, features, and value proposition of the different star tracker models.
By rigorously testing under practical astrophotography conditions, we're able to provide reliable recommendations that balance key factors like accuracy, ease of use, and portability. Our goal is to guide you towards the best star tracker for your specific requirements and budget.
Read more:
The best lenses for astrophotography
Best telescopes for astrophotography
Best camera equipment for astrophotography
The best CCD cameras for astrophotography
Best light pollution filters for astrophotography
