Star Adventurer StellarTune 4.0

Now a 5-7 working day turnaround on Star Adventurer Supercharges
(from receipt of Mount)

Delivery option - Go for our Easy Three Way Option for just £29.00
We ship you a box and packaging, we arrange collection and then ship it back to you when ready. (just choose this option at checkout)
Or ship it to us and just pay for the return postage.

Check out how your mount compares in our performance charts.


Why StellarTune™ your Star Adventurer ?

The Star Adventurer is probably one of the most popular portable 'tracker' mounts in existence. But like many of the Sky-watcher mounts we have found more performance! Mostly wide-field astrophotography is done unguided with these type of travel mounts, often with shorter lens focal lengths of less than 300mm and rarely more than 2 minutes per exposure.

We applied our build methodologies from our successfully accurate hypertuned mounts, and played with the Star Adventurer, pushing it as far as we could during summer testing. The standard mount has been tested in guiding from 2-4 arcseconds, and between 23-50 arcseconds by owners, from our research.

Tests have been carried out on the Star Adventurer but only on lighter payloads, but it can take an 5Kg+3Kg payload, so why can't you make the most of it?

The stock 1kg counterweight is fine for most setups, but with our exclusive BoDai CloverThree counterweight, three full 330ml cans take it to 1.2kg, with a max of 1.6kg, filled with sand or dirt. This means you can balance a 72mm refractor telescope, flattener reducer, DSLR Camera body AND a 50mm finder on this mount and reliably get under 2 arcseconds guided for over 2 hours (in tests) at a time, with Zero Dropped Frames! 

The result is a stable mount that tracks at circa 0.5 arc-second guided (tested 4.5kg) or less (depending on payload and balance). It means that you can now run a camera body and lens at up to 300mm, all night. OTA's under 500mm are best, unless it's a small 102mm (or less) Maksutov. Unguided, it can be down to 0.55-0.9 ArcSec/Min drift in RA, with our latest build, depending on it's original condition. We use our cutom SIDAC 36M Rig to test the Star Adventurer both before and after build down to 0.0001 ArcSec RA procession. 

That's the whole point of tuning your mount. It's about not losing up to 30-40% of your effort in lost data. Over a four hour chilly evening, would you really want to lose over an hours worth or more of imaging every time?

All of these mounts are optimised, not some part of a production build where a median set of tolerances are used for productivity.

We load test with a small refractor, and check and adjust the RA to eliminate any residual backlash as part of our meticulous build. It's even more important to be careful with such a small mount to check, check, check and check again your tolerances.

Below is a cropped single 10 minute (602 seconds to be precise) or our Star Adventurer with a 200mm EF lens (=320mm focal length  due to crop factor) on an APS-C Canon EOS450D. We have a stack of these and 5-8 minute ones, and will be adding other examples as we continue our development.

All our work on supercharged Star Adventurer mounts is guaranteed for 6 months.