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.

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. 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. It is a simple but effective way of eliminating the star trail effect of night sky photography without expensive equipment. To drive your tracker you will be rotating a threaded rod.

Acquired data with least squares linear fit. If you re in the northern hemisphere this is as simple as pointing your tracker s hinge at the north star. A barn door tracker is a camera attachment camera mount used to capture long exposures of night sky images. 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. There is a motorized version of this mount. Calibrating the barn door tracker with a digital level. This guide is for a manual single arm version which consists of a single arm board and is operated manually by the user.

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. There are many types of barn door tracker. Note also the red dot sight for alignment. Then i let it run with my tracker for a while and did some least squares fitting to see how it was working.

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.