Manual Barn Door Tracker

The double arm design was first described in an article by dave trott published in the february 1988 issue of sky telescope magazine.

Manual barn door tracker.

Shoot stars planets and other nebulae with a camera that is. The design is known from the 80 s as a barn door star tracker or a scotch mount. There are many types of barn door tracker. Calibrating the barn door tracker with a digital level.

A barn door is a specialized type of 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. Tracking was accomplished by continuously turning a long inch screw at a rate of one revolution per minute while the exposure was in progress. If you re in the northern hemisphere this is as simple as pointing your tracker s hinge at the north star.

It is a simple but effective way of eliminating the star trail effect of night sky photography without expensive equipment. 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. The mount shown here employs a type 4 double arm design. Then i let it run with my tracker for a while and did some least squares fitting to see how it was working.

Acquired data with least squares linear fit. Note also the red dot sight for alignment. To drive your tracker you will be rotating a threaded rod. A followup appeared in.

So i measured a nice and constant 7 255e 5 radians second over 10 minutes. The modest success of the manual version encouraged me to motorize it. With a barn door tracker it s the same concept except you align the trackers rotation with the rotational axis. This guide is for a manual single arm version which consists of a single arm board and is operated manually by the user.