What do “tracked” and “untracked” exposures mean in astrophotography?
Asked 5/14/2018
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I saw an Instagram image made by blending a long-exposure night sky with crashing waves. The photographer said they used a 4-minute tracked exposure for the sky and a 4-minute untracked exposure for the foreground to reduce noise. What does “tracked” mean here, and why would someone shoot the sky tracked but the foreground untracked?
Originally by Photography Stack Exchange contributor. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
Photography Stack Exchange contributor
8y ago
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Since the stars move in the frame during long exposures, you need a way to follow, or track their motion in the sky, so their light can be collected in points instead of being spread in short segments.
Actually it's the Earth rotating, but since we are rotating with it, this is what we see.
To compensate for Earth rotation you use an astronomical mount or a star tracker, a mount for your camera rotating around an axis that's parallel to our planet's, and that do a full rotation in the same time (1 day).
Depending on the camera and lens you plan to mount on and how much time you need it to track the stars, this kind of mounts can be as simple as a cooking timer or really big and complex. In the past DIY savvy people actually build this kind of equipment for themselves. They call it "barn-door mount".
Sometimes they are called equatorial mounts, and actually this is astronomical jargon, so I'm not surprised you couldn't find a clue.
When properly used, these mounts let you take long exposures of the stars, with pinpoint stars.
This way you can also take several shots of the same star field, and then stack them together to get a final image with less noise and more dynamic colours and light (it's more complex than this, but I hope you get the point).
If there's also some landscape object in the frame, you may want to do the same, stacking several untracked images to get a less noisy image of the landscape. Finally, you can merge cut away of mask the sky from the stack of the landscape, and put it over the image of the sky to get an overall nice, bright and crisp final image.
In the past few years telescope manufacturers made several small, light and convenient astronomical mounts like the SkyWatcher Star Adventurer Mini, often called just "sky trackers", aimed at photographers that do this kind of "landscape astrophotography".
Originally by user20180. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
user20180
8y ago
0
Generated from our catalog & community — verify before relying on it.
In astrophotography, a tracked exposure means the camera is mounted on a star tracker or astronomical mount that slowly rotates to match Earth’s rotation. This keeps the stars aligned on the sensor during a long exposure, so they stay as points instead of turning into trails.
An untracked exposure means the camera is fixed on a normal tripod with no motion compensation. In a long exposure like 4 minutes, the stars would blur or trail, but the landscape or foreground stays sharp because the camera isn’t moving relative to the ground.
That’s why photographers often shoot two frames:
- tracked exposure for the sky: cleaner, less noisy stars with longer exposure time
- untracked exposure for the foreground: a sharp landscape or waves without the ground blurring from tracker movement
They then blend the two images in post-processing. If you tracked the whole scene, the foreground would smear because the camera is moving to follow the sky.
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