Manual Barn Door Tracker

Acquired data with least squares linear fit.

Manual barn door tracker.

The mount shown here employs a type 4 double arm design. To drive your tracker you will be rotating a threaded rod. Then i let it run with my tracker for a while and did some least squares fitting to see how it was working. If you re in the northern hemisphere this is as simple as pointing your tracker s hinge at the north star.

This guide is for a manual single arm version which consists of a single arm board and is operated manually by the user. Shoot stars planets and other nebulae with a camera that is. A barn door tracker is a camera attachment camera mount used to capture long exposures of night sky images. The modest success of the manual version encouraged me to motorize it.

Tracking was accomplished by continuously turning a long inch screw at a rate of one revolution per minute while the exposure was in progress. There are many types of barn door tracker. A followup appeared in. So i measured a nice and constant 7 255e 5 radians second over 10 minutes.

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. Note also the red dot sight for alignment. 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. The design is known from the 80 s as a barn door star tracker or a scotch mount.

There is a motorized version of this mount. With a barn door tracker it s the same concept except you align the trackers rotation with the rotational axis. It is a simple but effective way of eliminating the star trail effect of night sky photography without expensive equipment. A barn door is a specialized type of equatorial mount.