Motorized Barn Door Mount

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

Motorized barn door mount. You mount your camera on the door then aim the hinge straight at the north star polaris. 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. What follows are instructions for building a simple motorized barn door photographic system for taking pictures of the night time sky. A manuscript entitled affordable astrophotography with a motorized barn door is available for download.

Don t get out of your car. 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. A key part of the assembly is the drive nut which couples the large gear to the threaded rod. You can use a straight tangent drive but the drive screw should be.

The mount i constructed is motorized. The motor was sourced from american science and surplus for about 2 50 and is a 1 rpm ac motor. 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. I am not aware of a stock number but the motor is marked as follows.

Great for vehicular sliding door applications the edison will civilize your sliding door operation like never before. 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. First cut the 500mm length in half and mount the hinge. Barn door photography systems have been around for years.

Let the edison sliding opener open your barn doors with ease. Singer controls division model 414 349 20 115v 60 hz 3w 1 rpm cw. 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. Don t get off of your tractor.

This tracking mount follows the stars as they move through the sky.