Manual Barn Door Tracker

If you re in the northern hemisphere this is as simple as pointing your tracker s hinge at the north star.

Manual barn door tracker.

So i measured a nice and constant 7 255e 5 radians second over 10 minutes. Then i let it run with my tracker for a while and did some least squares fitting to see how it was working. There is a motorized version of this mount. The main difference is that the body of the hinge tracker is just a hinge so there aren t any plywood parts to cut.

With a barn door tracker it s the same concept except you align the trackers rotation with the rotational axis. 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. 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. Note also the red dot sight for alignment.

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

To drive your tracker you will be rotating a threaded rod. Acquired data with least squares linear fit. 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. Shoot stars planets and other nebulae with a camera that is.

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.