Manual Barn Door Tracker

Note also the red dot sight for alignment.

Manual barn door tracker.

The design is known from the 80 s as a barn door star tracker or a scotch mount. 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. 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. There are many types of barn door tracker. A followup appeared in. Tracking was accomplished by continuously turning a long inch screw at a rate of one revolution per minute while the exposure was in progress.

A barn door tracker is a camera attachment camera mount used to capture long exposures of night sky images. A barn door is a specialized type of equatorial mount. With a barn door tracker it s the same concept except you align the trackers rotation with the rotational axis. Acquired data with least squares linear fit.

There is a motorized version of this mount. Shoot stars planets and other nebulae with a camera that is. The mount shown here employs a type 4 double arm design. 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.

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. 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. The modest success of the manual version encouraged me to motorize it.