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Field rotation is the reason why people for years have not used the Alt-az mounting for taking star photos. Track The Stars has made a big effort to address this issue, thus also making it possible to photographers to get the benefits of an Alt-az mounting.
Depending on you level as an astronomy photographer there are different solutions to look at:

• Photo Stacking
• Using a field derotater to compensate
• Using a new solution inventet by Track The Stars

We will start out with the most available solution.

Photo Stacking

Depending on where on the sky you want to take photos, you can get really nice result by just having short exposure and then stacking the pictures in software. This is possible with the mount as it is, and therefore the most available solution. The software is supporting the user with a number for how much field rotation there is at a given position, and by this telling the user for how long the exposures could be. On most objects this would be around 30 seconds.

For a good technical explanation see RASC Calgarys homepage.

Picture of a photo with field rotation. Read more on K3's Astronomy home page.

If you want to get the maximum potential of your system, you should consider one of the following solutions.

Field Derotater

By adding a field derotater to the telescope, you can even out the rotation arising from the Alt-az setup. A combination of a field derotator and an autoguider is very robust and can compare to much more expensive setups without any need for precise alignment of the physical mount.

Track The Stars own solution

Due to the solution is patent pending, we cannot describe the solution quite yet. The cost will be approximately the same as the field rotater solution, but there will be several more advantages.

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