Omegon LX3 Minitracker

Relpet · October 4, 2019

I'm lucky enough to be able to spend half the year in south-west France. It was there four or five years ago I first took an interest in astronomy because the skies on a clear night revealed more stars than I had ever seen from our permanent home in a part of Surrey totally overwhelmed by light pollution.

I made some fairly big investments in telescopes and eyepieces and have had a lot of pleasure from observing but like many others made a start on imaging, mainly the moon with a DSLR shooting through suitable EPs and a 12" Dob.

Having seen so many wonderful pictures of the Milky Way taken by amateurs and with a 360 degree Bortle 3 site just a few kms up the hills behind me I thought I had to give it a go. I bought a f2.8 wide-angle Rokinon lens for my Canon 500D, a Manfrotto head and a decent tripod but 20 seconds was about the longest exposure I could get without star trailing. Clearly I needed a tracking system but the prospect of hauling my AVX mount, power pack and telescope with camera mount up the hill was too daunting. A German friend introduced me to his clockwork Omegon LX2 Minitracker and after a few trial shots I was convinced this was the solution.

Soon after I found Omegon had released the LX3 in Europe. This has an improved mechanism but also a greatly improved polar finder over the LX2.

Needless to say the skies clouded over the day it arrived so some three weeks later finally I got a chance to use it.

The manual, which you have to download, is straightforward and once everything is attached shooting is utterly straightforward. I bought the version which includes the Omegon ballhead and I found that at some angles the ballhead could not keep the camera in position but 90% of the time the camera was rock steady. The clockwork timer will run for an hour on a single winding.

I've been able to try it on two nights recently, once from my yard and once from the hilltop. I'm still having a lot to learn about best aperture, ISO and timing combinations, not to mention post-processing but the attached pictures might give anyone else with an interest in Milky Way imaging some idea of the effectiveness of this mechanical rather than electrical device. I believe I captured the Andromeda galaxy halfway down the left of one picture though I'm happy to be corrected on that. The picture of the crescent moon and Jupiter setting, vastly over-exposed, is thrown in for fun. Except for that one the others were all two-minute exposures at ISO 1600 at f4.