everything feels high quality and sturdy. The dials are all big and can see they would be easy to use even with gloves

As noted earlier, the Star Adventurer GTi potentially provides all the capabilities available with larger equatorial mounts. But going beyond just getting your feet wet could rapidly become a frustrating experience. Adding all the components for a fully automated system will certainly overload the mount, and the limited accuracy of the go-to capability could add to frustration. If you are serious about getting deeply into automated astrophotography, you should move on to investing in a serious equatorial mount. Solar ObservingI've got WIFI working very easily with my old laptop and my smart phone, using the dedicated Synscan Pro App, but you can use any Syscan handset, using the hand controller port as well. There’s one feature that sets this mount apart: the GoTo (GT) capability. With this option, you can select a target on your smartphone – which can be stars, nebulae, or constellations – and the Star Adventurer GTi will find and automatically point your lens or telescope to the subject. This makes deep-sky astrophotography much easier, especially for beginners. The mount, being very portable and very easy to transport, I would've expected something like a dedicated Skywatcher GTI travel case or soft bag for it, as the box where the mount is stored is just a normal cardboard box, so I'm hoping Skywatcher would make such product, has I can see this mount being very popular. The Star Adventurer GTi with an astrophotography telescope mounted (Radian 61). Astrophotography Tests and Results This is the net extra budget you have to spend to make the Az-GTI perform as the Star Adventurer PRO 2i out of the box.

Very good performances: I can use my Celestron C5 with focal reducer to photograph galaxies, exposing for 120”/180”. Of course, guiding. Using a high-power eyepiece in the 76mm refractor, vibrations damped down in about three seconds, so just acceptable. After I slewed to Jupiter the GTi kept it dead center at 120x over a two-hour test, impressive indeed for a small mount. The power issue is made worse by the fact that neither the SynScan Pro app or the LED on the control panel provide any indication of battery level or low voltage. I found nothing in the instruction manual that explains why the panel’s LED usually double blinks but at times is solid red (the latter seems to be when the WiFi shuts off, though it is not clear under what circumstances that happens).I am in the middle of setting this up for first light tonight and so far my impressions are very positive: Ready to level up your astrophotography game? The Star Adventurer 2i is your stepping stone to greatness. This mount offers an enhanced payload capacity and features while maintaining portability. Capture the Milky Way, star clusters, and nebulae with ease. The SynScan app ensures precise control and alignment, simplifying the process of capturing long-exposure images without star trails. The 2i is tailor-made for those keen on advancing their skills and capturing more intricate details of the night sky. This rules out the use of a laser to polar align the mount: while great for using wide-angle lenses, this method is not accurate enough to allow such longer exposure with such a long focal length.

The phone/tablet apps and PC control programs leverage off the software designed for other Sky-Watcher mounts, providing not just go-to capability but also polar alignment assistance, and full connectivity with the ASCOM device driver software system running under Windows, making it possible to connect the mount control to planetarium programs such as Stellarium and automated imaging programs such as NINA. In this way, if you’re interested in dipping a toe into more advanced computer-controlled imaging setups in the future, you have a low-cost entry to practice on. Of course, if you are shooting with a wide angle of short telephoto lens (about 100mm), you’ll be fine with the Az-GTI and this kit or even with a laser pointer (although it gives very coarse alignment, can annoy other astrophotographers and may be illegal in your country or in that area). I believe there is, but not for long. The new version of the Star Adventurer added the WiFi connectivity and pulse dithering when the camera is controlled by the Star Adventurer, but that’s about it. On other nights I ran the GTi using ZWO’s ASIAir controller, the older Pro model which I reviewed here , not the newer Plus model. The Air Pro connected to the GTi’s USB port without complaint by selecting the Sky-Watcher AZ-GTi protocol in the ASIAir app, not the standard SynScan option. This shows the ASIAir’s app screens grabbed during one of the sessions. The GTi responded to dithering moves and settled fine, usually providing guiding errors under two arc seconds. Credit: Alan Dyer Overall with just a few minor adjustments on the RA freeplay, everything worked a treat, practically straight out of the box, and with autoguiding via a ST-4 lead, through PHD Guiding I was achieving 0.4 RMS on the guiding values which is very impressive performance for a lightweight portable mount.The tripod that comes with the GTi is much smaller and lighter than the one you would find on a full-blown equatorial mount. It’s not much to look at, but it actually feels surprisingly solid. There are some nice grippy, rubber feet on it. Part Number: 20326 The NEW Star Adventurer GTi is an excellent choice for anyone wanting a compact portable mount for visual astronomy or astrophotography. To get the most out of the Az-GTI for deep sky astrophotography, you should use a fully computerized setup, such as the ZWO ASIAIR PRO, the Stellarmate, or a computer. While you will benefit from these systems with a Star Adventurer too, at least for guiding, with the Az-GTI it is almost “mandatory” to go down that route and the theoretical initial 130€ extra budget we calculated before is much more likely to increase dramatically;

The free movement in right ascension is often stiffer than that in the Star Adventurer, making it difficult to achieve a good balance; Of note, while the instructions claim you cannot also control the mount from a third-party app like SkySafari using the same Apple iOS device, that’s untrue. Install the SynScanLink app, then when opening SkySafari’s Telescope control menu, choose SynScanLink as the connection protocol. You can now run the mount from either the SynScan Pro app or SkySafari, or both, with the latter providing a superb star atlas view of where you are pointed.

Packages and Features

You can now autoguide in both RA and DEC, control the brightness of the built-in illuminated reticle, and fine-tune your polar alignment with a studier, more substantial EQ wedge. Note: The GTI Mount Head is compatible with the Sky-Watcher Star Adventurer Tripod (S20555) Highlights A 76mm refractor rig weighing 4.9 kg, right at the specified limit, didn’t quite balance in RA but was close. However, sets of auto-guided images (as above) showed almost perfect guiding in all but the occasional frame, so this did prove a workable combination for imaging. I ran the Sky-Watcher Star Adventurer GTi at the Cherry Springs Star Party in 2023, and captured one of my favorite deep-sky images of all time. Control Sky-Watcher mount by Wi-Fi (mount needs build-in Wi-Fi / external SynScan Wi-Fi dongle) or by USB