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This is the third photo I've produced using my AstroTrac, again with good results. This time I was using for the first time my polar alignment via laser and my new 055XProB tripod with 488RC head. All performed very well.
The 055XProB is very well suited to the AstroTrac and my intended use. It's ability to handle uneaven ground and that it is useful for general photoraphy are the primary reasons I purchased it instead of the AstroTrac's purpose built pier. The tripod also had the neat feature of a purpose built hook to hang weight from to further stabalise it, and this proved great with it being ideal for hanging my 6 amp hour battery from, providing good ballast.
The Manfrotto 488RC head has turned out to be much better than expected in terms of usefulness. The fact that it has a seperate rotation clamp vs ball clamp (for adjusting just the rotation rather than the all-direction ball) has proved invaulable already. Using the rotation adjustment on it's own you can easily rewind the AstroTrac after it's 2 hours of tracking is reached and counter-rotate the ball head without adjusting the camera's other axis. This is great if you want to continue photographing the same subject for longer than two hours.
This photograph only contains 4 exposures because of the fiddling I was doing with the setup (inc testing polar alignment) and that the 5th exposure had a meteor going straight through it!.
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