Manual Barn Door Tracker

With a barn door tracker it s the same concept except you align the trackers rotation with the rotational axis.

Manual barn door tracker.

Tracking was accomplished by continuously turning a long inch screw at a rate of one revolution per minute while the exposure was in progress. 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. There are many types of barn door tracker. 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.

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. 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. This guide is for a manual single arm version which consists of a single arm board and is operated manually by the user. A barn door tracker is a camera attachment camera mount used to capture long exposures of night sky images.

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. Note also the red dot sight for alignment. There is a motorized version of this mount.

It is a simple but effective way of eliminating the star trail effect of night sky photography without expensive equipment. 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. So i measured a nice and constant 7 255e 5 radians second over 10 minutes. Calibrating the barn door tracker with a digital level.

To drive your tracker you will be rotating a threaded rod.