This shot of the Milky Way Galaxy was taken at Cape Leveque using my Canon 5D Mk 2 with the Vixen Polarie Star Tracker on my normal camera tripod.

The Vixen Polarie is a self-tracking unit that you can attach to any camera tripod, and after aligning it with the South Celestial Pole, allows you to track the stars and do longer and deeper exposures without getting star trails.

This particular image is a single exposure of almost 4 minutes, using the Samyang 14mm lens @ f/2.8, ISO3200.

It was my first real field test with the Vixen Polarie, and I didn’t take time to try and align it perfectly accurately with the SCP, or with the latitude (I was about at 18deg South), so there’s some slight trailing in the full-res version of the shot, but at the lower resolutions it’s difficult to tell. So all in all, I was pretty impressed with its performance – especially for an exposure of almost 4 minutes.

If you took the time to more accurately align it, it would be a great unit to use out in the field when travelling, especially because it’s so small, light and easy to transport.

I took a few other nightscape images with the polarie, and I’ll get around to posting those in the next week or so.

Thanks for looking.