Camera Barn Door Tracker

This tracking mount follows the stars as they move through the sky.

Camera barn door tracker.

Are there streaks on the film instead of pinpoin. Everyone can do astrophotography as long as you have a camera. The modest success of the manual version encouraged me to motorize it. 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.

It consists of two boards connected by a hinge with a bolt which is turned to move the two boards apart or towards each other to counter the effects of. If you re in the northern hemisphere this is as simple as pointing your tracker s hinge at the north star. With a barn door tracker it s the same concept except you align the trackers rotation with the rotational axis. So i measured a nice and constant 7 255e 5 radians second over 10 minutes.

Then you place that camera in the center of a merry go round that spins once in 24 hrs and you ve got a tracking covered. It is a simple but effective way of eliminating the star trail effect of night sky photography without expensive equipment. I ve tested it up to 400mm 600mm equivalent for full frame 35mm cameras with 30 second exposures giving results far beyond what i d hoped for before i built the tracker. High end astronomical telescopes usually have what s called a clock drive which slowly rotates the telescope allowing for those long exposure.

A barn door is a specialized type of equatorial mount. A barn door tracker also known as haig or scotch mount is a camera mount used to take long exposure photographs of the night sky without the star trails caused by the rotation of the earth. Beautiful stars clusters and nebulas. Then i let it run with my tracker for a while and did some least squares fitting to see how it was working.

But what is that. Just pop it on a tripod let the lens stay open for as long as possible and bam. Astrotracker a barn door star tracker. Calibrating the barn door tracker with a digital level.

Camera mounts of this design are also called haig or scotch mounts. Inexpensive and budget friendly it is useful for people interested in astrophotography but not ready to spend on expensive equipment. A barn door tracker also known as a haig or scotch mount is a device that slowly rotates a camera allowing it to track the stars so it can take long exposure photographs of the night sky. The nyx tracker is a motorized barn door tracker used for astrophotography.

I built an earlier manually operated version of the mount in the winter of 1997 for the apparition of comet hale bopp. Acquired data with least squares linear fit.