Astrophotography without tracking is absolutely possible and can produce stunning results with the right techniques. By choosing bright and stationary targets like the Milky Way, using a sturdy tripod, and applying methods like the 500 Rule, you can capture breathtaking night sky photos without the need for expensive tracking equipment. This guide will walk you through everything you need to know to master astrophotography without tracking, even as a beginner.

You can do astrophotography without a star tracker by attaching a DSLR camera to a sturdy tripod¹. This will limit the length of your exposures to 15-20 seconds. With a lens of 17–24mm, stacking hundreds of photos will create a good image of the Milky Way. Deep Sky targets need bigger lenses and shorter subs.

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We do need to look into this question much deeper because there are many variables that can make astrophotography harder without a star tracker mount. There is a lot more to answering this entirely, so stick with me. This page is filled not only with what you need to know but also with what I have learned through my own experience and research into this question of tracking.

Why Might We Use Tracking?

The reason we need a star tracker mount is that astronomical objects in the sky are moving, generally from east to west, depending on where in the sky the object or star is within our solar system. This movement occurs because our planet is rotating. In the Northern Hemisphere, where I live, stars and other objects in the sky seem to rotate around a point near Polaris, the North Star which we can also call the Polar Axis.

In order to counteract the rotation of the stars, we need to use a star tracker mount that follows the movement of the stars and moves in the opposite direction to keep the object in the centre of the field of view

Another reason we use a star tracker mount is to enable us to take long exposures to photograph faint objects in the sky and capture their fine details. Without a star tracker, we will get star trails and blurry images with less detail. Most telescopes, but not all, are sold with a tracking mount, but you can also buy a portable star tracker such as the Sky-Watcher Star Adventurer.

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Astrophotography without tracking is possible, but then we are limited to exposures no longer than about 30 seconds.

My research into this revealed that I could take up to 20-second exposures with a 17 or 24-mm lens on my astrophotography DSLR, a Canon 600D, with no star tracker as I attempted to image the Milky Way, resulting in less noise. This was possible because my target was generally high in the sky. I couldn’t see any trailing in the stars despite not using a tracker mount.

In March 2022, I went to Bali and experimented with astrophotography using a 50mm focal length lens and a DSLR with a tripod to photograph the Orion Nebula and Horsehead Nebula. I took 435 5-second exposures. Although the picture came out brilliantly on close inspection when zoomed in, the stars were trailing slightly even after 5 seconds of exposure time!

When I photographed these two objects, I noticed they were low on the horizon and eventually heading towards setting. This may have been a reason why even 5 seconds of astrophotography without tracking was still causing small amounts of star trailing. The 500 rule explains how long we can expose without star trails.

What is your Astrophotography Target?

Whether or not you can image the night sky without a star tracker depends on your target. Some targets, such as deep sky objects such as galaxies and nebulae, are so far away that they are extremely faint, so hours of long exposure times are usually necessary. For extremely difficult-to-image targets, it is best to use longer exposures in the minutes to get a quality image, but you can image these with much shorter untracked images if you take hundreds or even thousands of photos.

The target mentioned above, the Orion nebula, is very bright and not so far away, so short exposures can work. So to capture these kinds of bright targets, you do not need to use tracking.

Galaxies, apart from Andromeda, which is both massive and can be seen with the naked eye in dark skies, need longer exposures of one minute or more and several hours of exposure.

A Helpful Video about untracked astrophotography imaging is this one by Nico Carver: