Barn Door Tracker Calculator

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.

Barn door tracker calculator.

Inexpensive and budget friendly it is useful for people interested in astrophotography but not ready to spend on expensive equipment. A video diary of the digitization of my barn door tracker. I m looking forward to the rest of this series. The heart of my tracker is a heavy duty 8 inch strap hinge made by stanley hardware.

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. This tracking mount follows the stars as they move through the sky. It also shows diy. Calculating mount movements paul february 3 2014 at 8 57 am.

Cut your two blocks of wood pieces into 13 x 4 pieces. 33 thoughts on building a barn door mount part 2. Hinges scrap wood and even lantern batteries can often be found lying around in a suitably stocked garage. This shows how added a threaded stepper motor to the rig for automatic tracking.

Assembly setting up your door tracker. All dimensions except the barn door radius are limited to what you can find to buy. The nyx tracker is a motorized barn door tracker used for astrophotography. 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.

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. The initial dimensions are the ones used for the barn door tracker pictured above. You can however make a 6 wide board and use a 4 hinge but you may give up some stability.

It spins against the earth so you don t get star trails.