Dropped $230 on a star tracker for my camera and it turned my Milky Way shots into a blurry mess
So I finally pulled the trigger on a small star tracker mount about two months back, mostly because everyone in the astro forums kept saying you can't shoot the Milky Way without one. I drove out to a dark site near Big Bend with my DSLR and a cheap 50mm lens, all excited to finally get those clean 40 second exposures. Turns out I never balanced the rig right and the whole thing slowly drifted, so every single sub came out looking like I smeared vaseline on the lens. I got home with 180 frames of garbage and spent a whole Saturday night stacking blurry stars in DeepSkyStacker for nothing. My buddy who came along just used a tripod and the 500 rule and got a shot way better than anything I brought home. I'm not saying trackers are a scam, but nobody warned me that setup and polar alignment would eat up an hour of my night. Does anyone here actually get their tracker dialed in on the first try, or am I just that bad at it?