Yep, strictly hand-driven. Yes, I'll get around to putting a motor on it, maybe, one day...
.
One thing I did experiment with was an innovation of my own. It worked very well and let me image at focal length of 200mm. Instead of using a watch/timer I attached a video camera with long (200mm) telephoto lens for guiding. Used it to guide an SLR with wide-angle lens (50mm) but also used it for imaging video directly at long focal length (200mm). That worked a treat.
Here's a closeup shot of Eta Carina (D=200mm) created last year on the barn door using RGB filter and stacking B&W video. My Mintron 13V1C video camera has two outputs. One video port was used to capture data while the other video port was fed to a TV for guiding. A red box drawn around a bright star let me keep a guide star centred. Just turned the handle fast enough to keep the star in the box...
I've only done long-focal length (200mm) video imaging on a Barn Door a few times when I was just getting started in astro. If I spent more time on it (barn door video) today I'm sure I could produce a much better result. So many things to try, so little time....
