Manual Barn Door Tracker

There is a motorized version of this mount.

Manual barn door tracker.

To drive your tracker you will be rotating a threaded rod. Calibrating the barn door tracker with a digital level. The design is known from the 80 s as a barn door star tracker or a scotch mount. The modest success of the manual version encouraged me to motorize it.

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. Then i let it run with my tracker for a while and did some least squares fitting to see how it was working. Shoot stars planets and other nebulae with a camera that is. A barn door is a specialized type of equatorial mount.

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. With a barn door tracker it s the same concept except you align the trackers rotation with the rotational axis. Note also the red dot sight for alignment. There is a lot of information in the internet where you may find sophisticated designs that try to minimize the systematic errors of the first design.

So i measured a nice and constant 7 255e 5 radians second over 10 minutes. The double arm design was first described in an article by dave trott published in the february 1988 issue of sky telescope magazine. Acquired data with least squares linear fit. A barn door tracker is a camera attachment camera mount used to capture long exposures of night sky images.

This guide is for a manual single arm version which consists of a single arm board and is operated manually by the user. The mount shown here employs a type 4 double arm design. There are many types of barn door tracker. It is a simple but effective way of eliminating the star trail effect of night sky photography without expensive equipment.