This is a story about the results of our experiment with the type 1 barn door tracker and our Canon powershot A540 digital camera.
The canon can do up to a 15 second exposure max, unmodified.


This image is of Orion last night, 15 seconds while mounted on a tripod.
In this blowup to the right you can see very little star trailing even though Orion is on the celestial equator and apparent motion would be the most compared to other sections of the sky.

The next pair of images is with the same camera, using the CHDK firmware update, which allows us to expose up to 64 seconds.


The image itself is much brighter with far more stars appearing but noticeably trailed. The blowup on the right really demonstrates this.


This last pair shows another 64 second exposure, however this time the barn door tracker is operational.
The dial was being turned continuously at 1RPM, ie constantly being turn during the 64 second exposure while being aligned with Polaris.

Let’s take a final closeup look of all three of the images centred around the belt, sword and Betelgeuse:


15 sec untracked


64 sec untracked


64 sec tracked