How Long Time Barn Door Tracker

The nyx tracker is a motorized barn door tracker used for astrophotography.

How long time barn door tracker.

Commercial star tracking mounts can cost tens of thousands of rands. 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. Since the first one was invented back in 1976 they have been the go to solution for anybody who wants to shoot long exposures nightscapes without star trails on a budget. Barn door trackers have a long and storied history in amateur astronomy.

High end astronomical telescopes usually have what s called a clock drive which slowly rotates the telescope allowing for those long exposure. Cut your two blocks of wood pieces into 13 x 4 pieces. 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.

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. You can however make a 6 wide board and use a 4 hinge but you may give up some stability.