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.
Using a barn door tracker.
You need to turn the handle one full rotation per minute to compensate and match the earth s rotation and keep your stars aligned.
This will counter the effects of the earth s rotation as you move the tracker.
In order to use the tracker it will need to be polar aligned.
Just because of the limitations of the design and lengths of the bolts we can use a barn door tracker is only really capable of being used for approximately 8 10 minutes.
You can get a lot of parts for a tracker from this guy google bencooper karoo barn door tracker.
How to use your barn door tracker polar alignment.
Using a piece of plywood large enough to layout a 11 43 radius using a compass scribe the radius onto the plywood.
I have built a few trackers over the last few years using a slightly different design and a curved rod for greater tracking accuracy.
Using your new homemade barn door tracker.
Solidworks cad model of the barn door tracker.
I like this article the camera mount in particular is very ingenious.