The invention relates to a method for determining a spatial orientation of an auxiliary measurement object for a laser tracker, said measurement object having reference features which provide points of light. The tracker has a base, a support which can be pivoted in a motorized manner, a pivoting unit which can be rotated about a tilting axis in a motorized manner and which comprises an image capturing unit for capturing an image of the points of light, and a beam source for emitting a laser beam. According to the method, an image is captured in the direction of the auxiliary measurement object with respective capturable points of light, and the spatial orientation of the auxiliary measurement object is derived from image positions in the image for the points of light captured in the image using an image analysis.