Manual Barn Door Tracker

A barn door tracker is a camera attachment camera mount used to capture long exposures of night sky images.
Manual barn door tracker. 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. 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. 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. The main difference is that the body of the hinge tracker is just a hinge so there aren t any plywood parts to cut.
There is a motorized version of this mount. This guide is for a manual single arm version which consists of a single arm board and is operated manually by the user. 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.
So i measured a nice and constant 7 255e 5 radians second over 10 minutes. If you re in the northern hemisphere this is as simple as pointing your tracker s hinge at the north star. To drive your tracker you will be rotating a threaded rod. Note also the red dot sight for alignment.
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. 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. Acquired data with least squares linear fit. Tracking was accomplished by continuously turning a long inch screw at a rate of one revolution per minute while the exposure was in progress.
Calibrating the barn door tracker with a digital level.