Manual Barn Door Tracker

It is a simple but effective way of eliminating the star trail effect of night sky photography without expensive equipment.

Manual barn door tracker.

To drive your tracker you will be rotating a threaded rod. With a barn door tracker it s the same concept except you align the trackers rotation with the rotational axis. So i measured a nice and constant 7 255e 5 radians second over 10 minutes. If you re in the northern hemisphere this is as simple as pointing your tracker s hinge at the north star.

A barn door tracker also known as a haig or scotch mount is a device used to cancel out the diurnal motion of the earth for the observation or photography of astronomical objects it is a simple alternative to attaching a camera to a motorized equatorial mount. David hash s arduino barn door tracker university student david hash now an aerospace engineer updated peterson s build with an arduino pro microcontroller 1 8 stepper and pololu microstepping driver board to give 3 200 microsteps per rotation figure b. Then i let it run with my tracker for a while and did some least squares fitting to see how it was working. Calibrating the barn door tracker with a digital level.

No arduino no stepper motors no gears just a simple motor turning a threaded rod this barn door tracker rotates your camera at the exact same rate as the rotation of our planet a requirement for taking long exposure photos. There is a motorized version of this mount. A barn door tracker is a camera attachment camera mount used to capture long exposures of night sky images. While it s possible to make a bracket to attach the motor off to the side where it is on my barn door tracker i chose to mount mine in line for a more compact assembly.

Acquired data with least squares linear fit. More information on other types of barn door tracker can be found at starnamers blog and a motorised version is detailed on this aticle on petapixel. Shoot stars planets and other nebulae with a camera that is. The main difference is that the body of the hinge tracker is just a hinge so there aren t any plywood parts to cut.

Tracking was accomplished by continuously turning a long inch screw at a rate of one revolution per minute while the exposure was in progress.