Move Shoot Move — World’s smallest star tracker review
Astrophotography is a little rabbit hole, jump in at your peril. One day you’re ecstatic that you’ve gotten a shot in focus, then the next day you’re researching star trackers. Welcome to the beautiful insanity, Dear Reader.
Now, if you’re like me, size is going to be a big factor in what you buy. You’re already going to have a tripod, a wide angle lens, and you’re probably heading out into the wilderness to get away from that pesky light pollution.
Enter: Move Shoot Move: The Tiny Star Tracker That Could.
The device its self is super simple. You have a tripod mount, some simple options (northern or Southern Hemisphere, stars or timelapse modes) and then another tripod mount to stick on your own ball head. Which I strongly suggest you do.
Now, in your research you’ll have no doubt come across the dreaded calibration and polar alignment part of star tracking. Maybe you’ve watched a few tutorials and scratched your head a bit? I certainly did. There are things to point, apps to download, latitude and longitude to calculate and a whole host of confusing stuff with most star trackers.
Not so with the Move Shoot Move.
they’ve come up with this ingenious system that involves a laser. Yes you read that right. You get to play with a super powerful, bright green, seen-for-mile-around laser pointer.
To polar align the Move Shoot Move (with the laser bundle, which is definitely the one you should buy) all you have to do, Dear Reader, is:
1) make sure your tripod is LEVEL
2) attach your laser to the Move Shoot Move and point the damn thing at Polaris, or the North Star.
Done. Bosh. Start taking photos. Get a hot mug of tea. Let the magic happen.
If you’re like me, you’ll need an app to locate Polaris, which is the star everything else rotates around. But sometimes even I can figure out where it is without any digital aids. There are tons of free phone apps to help you. I’d recommend choosing one that has a night mode (where everything is red) to preserve your night vision.
6o second exposure at 24mm. That isn’t possible without a lovely star tracker.
Move Shoot Move Results
As you can see from the image above, you can get some seriously long exposures once everything is set up properly. I’m not going to pretend I did this first go, because I didn’t. I struggled with focus, and sometimes my tripod wasn’t completely level (get one with a spirit bubble!).
But this is absolutely user error and the more I use it the easier all this will become.
Using the 500 rule, which I covered in my Astrophotography for Beginners articles, you are limited to how long you can take an image when you don’t use a star tracker. After a certain point the stars begin to blur and everything sucks. Damn the cosmos and it’s ceaseless movement. A star tracker lets you extend that shooting time by a LOT. Like, a lot.
With a wide angle lens, you can push it to several minutes. With a more narrow focal length you’ll be able to get a bit more good stuff but I wouldn’t push it too far with the Move Shoot Move. You know all that complex polar aligning the other trackers do? That’s because they’re more precise than a laser pointer. For wide angle lenses, it doesn’t matter a great deal. If you want more close up shots you may want to consider a more hard core star tracker.
Me? All my astrophotography will be pretty wide. I’m a landscape photographer at heart and I want all that lovely foreground in. So anything below 35mm in full frame terms is just fine by me. Gimme that laser! Gimme that easy set up! Pew pew pew.
check out the video below for more info and if you’d like to check out the Move Shoot Move you can here