Abstract: An optical tracker for automatically following a designated end-point of an elongated target, such as the nose of a missile, by orienting the received image to align with a predetermined reference and nutating the image over orthogonal detectors to detect an alignment error between the end-point of the target and the optical axis of the optical system. Orientation alignment errors are corrected by appropriately rotating an image rotating optical element about the optical axis, while the optical axis alignment errors are corrected by responsively redirecting the optical system until detected errors are minimal.