Manual Barn Door Tracker

There is a motorized version of this mount.

Manual barn door tracker.

Shoot stars planets and other nebulae with a camera that is. With a barn door tracker it s the same concept except you align the trackers rotation with the rotational axis. The mount shown here employs a type 4 double arm design. A followup appeared in.

This guide is for a manual single arm version which consists of a single arm board and is operated manually by the user. Calibrating the barn door tracker with a digital level. 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. Then i let it run with my tracker for a while and did some least squares fitting to see how it was working.

There are many types of barn door tracker. A barn door is a specialized type of equatorial mount. If you re in the northern hemisphere this is as simple as pointing your tracker s hinge at the north star. Acquired data with least squares linear fit.

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. So i measured a nice and constant 7 255e 5 radians second over 10 minutes. Tracking was accomplished by continuously turning a long inch screw at a rate of one revolution per minute while the exposure was in progress.

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