Motorized Barn Door Mount

Don t get off of your tractor.

Motorized barn door mount.

The mount i constructed is motorized. Edison sliding openers aos for garages doors or pole barns. The motor was sourced from american science and surplus for about 2 50 and is a 1 rpm ac motor. This tracking mount follows the stars as they move through the sky.

You can buy fancy motorized equatorial mounts for telescopes and cameras but it s way cheaper and more satisfying to build your own simple barn door tracking mount using a long bolt or threaded rod as a drive screw. First cut the 500mm length in half and mount the hinge. The tracking action of the barn door mount is achieved by lifting the upper board at the correct rate by means of a motor driving a nut on a threaded rod. Barn door photography systems have been around for years.

Don t get out of your car. You mount your camera on the door then aim the hinge straight at the north star polaris. Make sure everything is square and moves freely clap the 2 hinged boards together and shout action a few times like they do when making movies if it makes a nice clack sound it should work well for a star tracker now measure 228 55mm from the center of the hinge pin down the middle of the board and mark the drive rod holes do this on. I am not aware of a stock number but the motor is marked as follows.

The nyx tracker is a motorized barn door tracker used for astrophotography. Let the edison sliding opener open your barn doors with ease. The barn door mount i built took only a few hours of effort and cost only a few dollars over the tripod and camera ball mount i already had. A manuscript entitled affordable astrophotography with a motorized barn door is available for download.

Inexpensive and budget friendly it is useful for people interested in astrophotography but not ready to spend on expensive equipment. You can use a straight tangent drive but the drive screw should be. Great for vehicular sliding door applications the edison will civilize your sliding door operation like never before. What follows are instructions for building a simple motorized barn door photographic system for taking pictures of the night time sky.

There are several designs out there the one i made is called a curved sector drive because the threaded rod it uses is curved.