 This is the Skywatcher StarVenture GTI and this is the Benro Polaris Astro Edition. These both have a lot of interesting high-tech features. They both come with smartphone apps to control them and they are both go-to star trackers that are small enough that you can backpack with them. While many people would use these for landscape astrophotography or other kinds of wide field stuff like milky way shooting, constellation shooting, I was interested in how they compare for stripped down deep sky astrophotography with just a camera and a telephoto lens. And so we're going to compare the setup procedure of these two devices. We'll look at the apps you use to control them and finally we're going to see what the limits for the tracking ability at 85 millimeter focal length is for both of these maps. Hello, I'm Nico. This channel is all about my interest in astrophotography, specifically deep sky, where we capture objects like nebulae that are outside of our solar system. Since this is a review, I need to disclose that these two products that I'm going to be reviewing were sent to me for review by Skywatcher USA and Benro USA. But neither company has any input into what I say in this video and no money has exchanged hands. This video does have a sponsor which is wire stock and I'm going to say more about them midway through. So if you've seen my videos on my channel before, you probably already are aware that you don't need a telescope to capture deep sky objects. You actually don't even truly need a star tracker. You can definitely get started with just a camera and a lens on a fixed tripod. But usually after trying that a few times, a logical next step would be to add a star tracker like one of these in between the tripod and the camera. And typically star trackers have been very simple devices that you just align to the celestial pole turn on and they track the stars, meaning counteract the Earth's rotation so that the result is in a long exposure. The stars stay pinpoint rather than turning into star trails. And these long exposures allow us to bring out things that are much dimmer than the stars like nebulae, which are clouds of gas and dust. Now I said star trackers have been simple devices because these days manufacturers are starting to offer trackers with a lot more sort of smart tech built in, which is why I call them high tech star trackers in the title. And these are two such high tech star trackers that are both pretty new to the market. And as such you can expect some growing pains as the manufacturers hear what the complaints are and try to smooth out any wrinkles. But they're already pretty good. This one, the Star Adventurer GTI, is a new addition of a very popular star tracker from Skywatcher. And what they've done is basically turn a star tracker into a mini equatorial mount like you'd use with a telescope. So I'd say what makes this product high tech is that they have miniaturized all of the features of a bigger computerized go to equatorial mount. And they also made it wireless. So you can use it with the included app. But all the normal conventions of using a go to equatorial mount are still there. So for someone like me who's been doing this a long time, and is actually pretty used to the setup, the steps, the polar alignment, star alignment, that's all really familiar and works quite well. But when we do get to that part of the setup, I'm going to treat it like I'm new to the hobby. So I'm going to take some time to talk about things that beginners often struggle with when setting up a go to equatorial mount. Now this product, the Benro Polaris, I'd say this is unlike anything we've seen before. They're selling it in different configurations. So if you don't want star tracking, you can just get a two axis Benro Polaris. That is what they're just calling a smart tripod head. And that's good for making panoramas and time lapses and things like that. But if you get the Astro edition, which adds in this third axis right here and just plugs into the mount, that allows for a long exposures of the night sky. Now this is a different way of tracking than we're used to for deep sky. It's not an equatorial mount like this one. You don't have to first polar align this. Polar alignment is when you point at the celestial pole, if you're in the Northern Hemisphere, you can point at Polaris. Instead, this is what we call an alt-as mount, but it uses your smartphone in clever ways to get it set up really fast. And then it seems to at least partially get around the field rotation issue that are normally associated with alt-as mounts by knowing which part of the sky you're pointed in and then using the three axes to compensate for that field rotation. And this actually seems to work pretty well. So that's an overview of these two. Next, we're going to jump into how you'd set up each device for basic deep sky astrophotography. Again, just a camera and lens. And I'm mostly shooting this during the day, this setup portion, just to make it easier to see what I'm doing. But I'm basing all of this information and actually using these devices at night. The star adventurer GTI can be powered conventionally through the 12 volt power input here or conveniently through eight double eight batteries. For some reason for me, when running off batteries, the red power LED blinks red rather than staying solid. But the mount still works perfectly fine running off double A's. I'm using the matched Skywatcher tripod, but you can use any tripod with a three eighth inch stud at the top. The attachment point at top of the mount is for a vixen style dovetail plate, which is an astronomy standard. And so if you don't have one, you can buy them in a variety of sizes and styles. I am not using the counterweight system for these tests since I wanted to run the GTI in a very simple sort of backpacker kind of mode to compare it to the very small Benro Polaris. But the counterweight system is recommended, especially with heavier payloads like a small telescope. Okay, to polar align the GTI, the first thing is you have to turn the deck access 90 degrees like this so that the hole inside the mount lines up, allowing us to see through the internal Polaris scope. Once that's done, the first thing I do is just roughly line up the mount with Polaris by sight, just using my eye, not looking through the Polaris scope yet. And this is a good idea. So that once we look into the scope, it will hopefully the star Polaris will hopefully be in the field of view when we look through the Sinscan pro app that we use to control the mount has a polar clock utility in the utilities menu that will update continually. So that's what I use to show me where to put Polaris on the clock. And we just use the alt as knobs to adjust until Polaris is in the right position on that clock in the reticule. Now for this test, I was not obsessive about polar alignment. I think I did it competently, but I didn't spend more than about 30 seconds on it. If you're brand new to the hobby, expect to spend a bit longer on polar alignment. Your first night out, it can be quite frustrating until you sort of get it down. Now with a go to mount, we are not done aligning with just polar alignment. We also need to do a star alignment, which builds the pointing model so that the mount can accurately go to different objects in the night sky. The way this star alignment works is you pick a bright star from a list, one that you can identify in the night sky. The GTI tries to go to that star, but it's usually a little bit off. So then you correct it with the arrow keys until the star is centered on your camera screen. And I should say you have to finish centering with the up and right arrows. And if you don't do this, the apple actually prompt you to do it and not let you finish alignment until you tap those. And the reason for this is to help with backlash of the gears. The actual night that I shot my test, I just did a one star alignment on Altair. So I could compare directly how that works between the GTI and the Benro Polaris. But normally a two or three star align is always better for go to accuracy. And after you are star aligned, you can just click on the deep sky menu and the skin scan app has the Messier, the Caldwell, NGC and IC catalogs, as well as many, many named deep sky objects like the Iris Nebula that I was going after. And so this should be plenty in terms of options for most astrophotographers. But if that wasn't enough, the GTI also connects to a very full featured paid planetarium app called Sky Safari. It's I'm on Sky Safari 7 Pro. And this has even more objects and stars. And you can also just swipe around a planetarium and then go to anything once you've connected the GTI to Sky Safari. Or if you don't like smartphone apps, you can even connect the GTI to a computer with a cable. And there are a ton more software options on a computer. So and many of them If you're like me, you have taken, you know, thousands of photos and videos over your lifetime just sitting on hard drives, but you've never tried stock photography. Of course, I'd heard about stock photography, marketplaces like Shutterstock and things like that. But I've never felt that I had time to submit to all of these different marketplaces and think up the keywords and all that. And so this is why I was super excited that Wirestock approached me to sponsor this video. Wirestock will submit your photos to all the major marketplaces, including Shutterstock, Getty Images, Adobe Stock, and many more. And they will take care of the key wording and captioning for free. If I sell photos on any of those marketplaces, I'll get paid through my Wirestock dashboard. And then they take a flat 15% commission fee for making this all so easy, which I think is well worth it. They also have an option to set up a personal online shop with them for selling your photos and prints directly, where you have complete control over the pricing. So if you're interested in a super easy way to start selling your photos, videos and vectors online, check out wirestock.io and get started with a free account. The Benro Polaris charges over USB C to an internal battery and Benro says that that battery will last for 24 hours per charge. It does come with a USB C charging cable, but it doesn't come with the charger. You can charge it while the unit is tracking. I tried it with an anchor power bank, and I could see that the battery percentage was going up in the Benro Polaris app while the unit was actually tracking the night sky. It comes in a nice soft carry bag and in that bag, it's in its storage configuration. So the correct way to set it up is to do a short and then long press on the power button, and you'll hear these three short beeps, and then it will unfurl. Then turn the Polaris back off with one long press on the power button and attach it to your tripod. And then once it's attached to the tripod, you can attach the Astro component, this third axis like this. Make sure that the short Astro cable goes into the ports labeled extra on both the Astro part and on the main part of the tripod head. And then we can turn the Polaris back on again with the short press followed by a long press, and then we can connect to the Benro Polaris app, which is easy enough. You just download it, it connects over Wi-Fi, and these circles are the virtual joysticks for panning and tilting the mount. And the first thing I'm going to do is double tap them both, which is useful because it sort of helps with leveling. So you can see it moves into this position. And then I'm just going to use the measure app on my iPhone here, which has a level feature. And then using the leveling base on my tripod to level everything out. Now I'm going to attach my camera. And normally the next thing you do is actually connect the camera over USB to the Polaris, which is necessary for doing panoramas and time lapses and stuff like that. I did not find it necessary for Deep Sky Astro. And in fact, I found it annoying because the live view through the USB connection was very grainy and hard to make out any details on the night sky. So it wasn't good for focusing or finding stars or anything like that. And when you connect a Canon camera at least to the Benro Polaris, then the live view on your LCD screen or your LCD screen in general just gets blacked out and you can't use that. So I didn't use the cable. It doesn't really do anything special for Deep Sky. It doesn't do plate solving or anything like that. So I just really don't think it's necessary. So unless they can improve sort of the quality of the live view, I would just go without it for now. And I just used a reliable old external intervalometer that I'm quite used to for programming in the bulb exposures, things like that. You can dismiss the message about the camera not connected by swiping up on it. Now, one really cool thing is calibrating this mount so it understands its position. It's really cool and really easy. You just go to the Astro mode. It will ask you to calibrate and then you just put your phone next to the Polaris exactly like it shows in the little drawing on screen and press calibrate. And it uses the sensors in your phone like the gyroscope and the GPS to figure everything out and understand how it's positioned, you know, your location and how it's positioned in terms of the cardinal directions. And so this roughly replaces polar alignment. It's much easier than what you'd have to do with an equatorial mount where you have to like look through an actual mini telescope and get Polaris all positioned like that. Now, to make it actually accurate for go to going to certain objects in the night sky, you do have to do a star alignment just like we did with the GTI. So again, to make it a fair comparison, I just did a one star align with Altair which worked perfectly fine. And when you're adjusting it, you can use the virtual joysticks for fine adjustment. You can tap on those circles and get a fine adjustment control or you can just reach out and use the big physical knobs, which I thought was really fun. After I star aligned, I tried to find the iris nebula in the go to catalog. And unfortunately, there was only one NGC object in the whole catalog on the app. And I couldn't find it in the named objects or anything like that. The app does have all the messier objects, which is good. But it just is missing, you know, most NGC objects and things like that. I eventually figured out if you click this little pencil icon, it allows you to put in RA and DEC coordinates directly. So that's why I ended up doing. I just looked up the RA and DEC coordinates for iris nebula on Sky Safari and then put them in here. But I hope for a future update, Benro adds more deep sky objects to the app. At least the NGC and IC catalogs would be nice. I'd also encourage them to look into making the device work with Ascom Indie drivers or at least the Sky Safari app, as I think that would open it up to a lot more possibilities for serious astronomers and astrophotographers. Okay, that was it for the setup. Now we can actually compare the results that I got. Neither the Benro Polaris or the Skywatcher Star Adventure GTI perfectly centered the iris nebula after a one star alignment. That's sort of what I expected. Now, if I had aligned on more stars and specifically stars close to the iris nebula like Alderamin, I'm sure they both would have done a lot better in terms of centering the iris nebula. But I was interested in how well they did with just a one star alignment, and they both just did okay. They at least got the iris nebula in frame at 85 millimeters, but neither got it right in the center. For testing tracking accuracy, I started at 30 seconds photos. I took a bunch of exposures on each tractor at 30 seconds, found they both did great. No problems at all. All the shots that I took, I took like 10 on each were keepers. And this is definitely what I expected with the Star Adventure GTI, but I didn't know what to expect with Benro Polaris. So I was definitely happy about that. I often just shoot 30 second subs at like ISO 3200 with a bright aperture like f2.8 and find that works quite well for me. I have no problem bringing out really dim dust, just with short exposures like that from a dark side. But I wanted to test the limits of tracking with these in, you know, this configuration, no counterweights, 85 millimeter lens. So I doubled to one minute exposures, and again, perfectly round stars with both. I then doubled to two minute exposures. And again, they both look great. So at this point, I doubled to four minute exposures. And this was as far as I had to go because at this point, they both sort of started to show some star trailing. However, I'm pretty confident that if I have used a counterweight and had done a really good job with polar alignment, I could have gotten four minute exposures with round stars out of the GTI. Because this looks to me like polar alignment error, where, you know, the way that the stars are just trailed in the same amount in the same direction all across the field. Well, with the Benro Polaris, the shape of these star trails, where it looks sort of trailed, but then also a little bit of curvature, suggests to me that this is probably the limit of what this style of tracker can do in a single exposure. But here's the big takeaway. I think the fact that they both can do two minute sub exposures with a heavy 85 millimeter lens and no counterweights is great. That means for me, it's a complete success. I'd be happy bringing either of these on a trip for my portable deep sky tracking needs with just a very sort of lightweight setup. But for serious deep sky astrophotography, because you can do a lot with an 85 or 135 millimeter lens. So to wrap up this video, I have a summary slide. If you're actually deciding between these two star trackers in particular, the star adventure GTI is cheaper at $640 for just the head or 740 with the tripod included. While the Benro Polaris is definitely an expensive little guy, the Astro Edition comes in 1149 for the three axis head. So that's about $500 more than the GTI. The GTI, you do need to polar align. And so if you don't have a view of Polaris, that can be challenging. The GTI can connect to tons of stuff, including laptops, ASI air, sky safari, etc. because it has drivers written for it. It's, you know, in a long history of sky watcher mounts that can be connected to everything while the Benro Polaris is a new product with none of these connections. Tracking ability seems pretty good on both, but the GTI probably has the edge there. As long as you do a careful polar alignment and balancing, I think you could get it to track, you know, even longer exposures than four minutes probably. The GTI's special feature that the Polaris does not have is the ability to use an auto guiding system. And that's going to definitely allow you to take even longer tracked exposures. I did, you know, five minutes with narrow band and everything back in my first review. It also will allow you, if you auto guide to dither between exposures, which helps a lot with noise. Now the Benro Polaris's special feature, or special features, I should say, like automated panoramas and time lapses and things like that, those may be worth the extra cost that extra $500. I didn't cover those in this review, since they're a bit out of my wheelhouse. But I would say the Polaris is a perfectly capable little deep sky tracker that's pretty easy to use. So if you're looking for that, plus its ability to do these automated panoramas and time lapses, it's probably the device to get even though it's expensive. If you're looking for a really portable equatorial mount that can be the base for a more complex deep sky imaging setup with auto guiding counterweights, computer control, but then also can work for this more stripped down setup that I showed in this video, then I think the Skywatcher Star Adventure GTI is what I'd recommend. And you're now seeing all of my current members on my Patreon campaign. If you want to see your name in the credits, you can sign up over on patreon.com slash nebula photos. It has a bunch of benefits outside of your name in the credits of long videos. I have made some exclusive videos just for Patreon. There's monthly zoom chats. There's a discord community where you can ask questions. There's monthly imaging challenges. There's imaging projects with a group. And of course, there's direct way to message me with all of your comments and questions. So if you like these videos, you want to learn more and learn faster, consider joining over there on Patreon for as little as $1 a month. Again, the link is patreon.com slash nebula photos. Until next time, this has been Miko Carver, Clear Skies.