Camera Barn Door Tracker

Note also the red dot sight for alignment.

Camera barn door tracker.

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. A barn door is a specialized type of equatorial mount. This tracking mount follows the stars as they move through the sky.

The nyx tracker is a motorized barn door tracker used for astrophotography. It is a simple but effective way of eliminating the star trail effect of night sky photography without expensive equipment. 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.

Acquired data with least squares linear fit. Just pop it on a tripod let the lens stay open for as long as possible and bam. 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. If you re in the northern hemisphere this is as simple as pointing your tracker s hinge at the north star.

Astrotracker a barn door star tracker. Are there streaks on the film instead of pinpoin. Camera mounts of this design are also called haig or scotch mounts. With a barn door tracker it s the same concept except you align the trackers rotation with the rotational axis.

High end astronomical telescopes usually have what s called a clock drive which slowly rotates the telescope allowing for those long exposure. Calibrating the barn door tracker with a digital level. The modest success of the manual version encouraged me to motorize it. 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.

This exposure of the orion nebula with a 180mm f2 8 lens shows how well the barn door tracker works even with subjects near the celestial equator. A barn door tracker is a camera attachment camera mount used to capture long exposures of night sky images. Everyone can do astrophotography as long as you have a camera. Beautiful stars clusters and nebulas.

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. I built an earlier manually operated version of the mount in the winter of 1997 for the apparition of comet hale bopp.