Inexpensive and budget friendly it is useful for people interested in astrophotography but not ready to spend on expensive equipment.
Barn door tracker calculator.
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All dimensions except the barn door radius are limited to what you can find to buy.
This shows how added a threaded stepper motor to the rig for automatic tracking.
You can use any brand the crucial parameter is the distance from the centre of the hinge pin to the centre of the hole at the far end of the hinge which should be close to 7 3 16 inches 182mm.
You can however make a 6 wide board and use a 4 hinge but you may give up some stability.
A home made barn door tracker will cost less than half as much if you buy everything new and even less if you only buy the parts unique to the tracker the motor mount tripod bushings and tripod ball head.
The nyx tracker is a motorized barn door tracker used for astrophotography.
The initial dimensions are the ones used for the barn door tracker pictured above.
A sidereal day on earth is 23 hours 56 minutes and 4 091 seconds long or 1436 minutes about 4 minutes shorter than a standard solar day and we can use this time to calculate the rate at which the barn door tracker needs to turn.
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Hinges scrap wood and even lantern batteries can often be found lying around in a suitably stocked garage.
A video diary of the digitization of my barn door tracker.
I m looking forward to the rest of this series.
I ve been looking for a good arduino project for a while and also looking into a tracking mount for my camera this project would suit both perfectly.
33 thoughts on building a barn door mount part 2.
Assembly setting up your door tracker.
It spins against the earth so you don t get star trails.
This tracking mount follows the stars as they move through the sky.
That means we want to spin our barn door tracker at a rate of 360 degrees every 24 hours which comes out to be 0 25 degrees per minute.
The calculator at the right will find the proper barn door radius given any combination of the other dimensions.
Calculating mount movements paul february 3 2014 at 8 57 am.