Motorized Barn Door Mount

Inexpensive and budget friendly it is useful for people interested in astrophotography but not ready to spend on expensive equipment.

Motorized barn door mount.

Don t get off of your tractor. This tracking mount follows the stars as they move through the sky. What follows are instructions for building a simple motorized barn door photographic system for taking pictures of the night time sky. The motor was sourced from american science and surplus for about 2 50 and is a 1 rpm ac motor.

Great for vehicular sliding door applications the edison will civilize your sliding door operation like never before. I am not aware of a stock number but the motor is marked as follows. Singer controls division model 414 349 20 115v 60 hz 3w 1 rpm cw. 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.

Let the edison sliding opener open your barn doors with ease. 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. You can use a straight tangent drive but the drive screw should be. The mount i constructed is motorized.

First cut the 500mm length in half and mount the hinge. There are several designs out there the one i made is called a curved sector drive because the threaded rod it uses is curved. Barn door photography systems have been around for years. You mount your camera on the door then aim the hinge straight at the north star polaris.

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. Edison sliding openers aos for garages doors or pole barns. 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. A key part of the assembly is the drive nut which couples the large gear to the threaded rod.

A manuscript entitled affordable astrophotography with a motorized barn door is available for download.