I made a big step towards ultra-portable astrophotography. On Kythira I first time placed my workhorse Canon EOS 6Da on mini mount Baader Nanotracker and made quite stunning pictures of the Milky Way. I was so excited and started to think about more serious “pocket-size” astrophotography. The requirements were the following: no external batteries, telescope, and camera should have max. 1.5 kg weight, focal length around 200 mm. The camera it’s simple, I simply keep using my modified Canon 6D.

The telescope is quite trickier, but I found Askar FMA, which has a 220 mm focal length, which is shortened by included a full-frame reducer to 180 mm. Aperture 40 mm yields for this focal length to speed F 4.5. The scope weighs only 400 g (700 g with the rings and EOS adapter). There is an M48 thread at the front of the telescope, which is very useful to attach the 2” mounted filters, particularly if you live in a light-polluted area.

There are several travel mounts on the market. Probably the most famous is Skywatcher Star Adventurer. I was about to pull the trigger on this mount, but I found another one, which will fulfill my requirements even better – iOptron SkyGuider Pro. iOptron has the same payload (5 kg with counterweight, 1.5 kg without) and has many interesting features:

• Integrated illuminated polar scope
• The torque from the motor to the worm gear is transmitted by a belt (this should minimize the backlash),
• Integrated battery, which can be changed by USB cable
• ST-4 socket for autoguiding

iOptron is slightly lighter than Skywatcher, so the decision was made. And how does it perform? I must say: VERY WELL! I got a chance to use it at home, so I screwed the IDAS NB1 filter in front of the Askar and captured the center region of the Orion and California nebula. The mount is tracking very accurately even without any counterweight and the number of bad photos caused by poor tracking was zero.

The telescope surprised me very positively as well. The connection to the camera is done by T-thread (M42), so I expected significant vignetting on the full-frame sensor, because the diameter of the thread is 42 mm, whereas the diagonal of the sensor is 43 mm. Surprisingly, it vignettes very little, and even flat frames are not necessary. The darker corners can be corrected by dynamic background extraction in PixInsight. The stars are a little bit oval at the bottom corners, but we are here looking at a full-frame sensor. In the end, I am very happy with the price/weight/performance ratio of Askar.

Let’s have a look at how heavy is the whole rig:

Tripod	2.3 kg
iOptron SkyGuider	1.5 kg
Canon EOS 6D	0.8 kg
Askar	0.7 kg
Total	5.3 kg

This can fit into any backpack.

Here are the pictures:

Technical details:

Lens	Askar FMA180 F4.5
Camera	Canon EOS 6Da
Mount	iOptron Skyguider Pro
Exposure	60x60s, ISO 1600
Date	2021-02-18

Technical details:

Lens	Askar FMA180 F4.5
Camera	Canon EOS 6Da
Mount	iOptron Skyguider Pro
Exposure	44x120s, ISO 1600
Date	2021-02-18