Hot Shoe Red Dot Finder

Having taken a few wide field images with my DSLR on the EQ3-2 now, I’ve realised what a pain it is getting the target area in the field of view when much of it is too faint to see, let alone getting the framing right. So I decided to modify a spare red dot finder to fit on the hot shoe and allow me to get the target in the frame more easily.

I started off by removing the base from the finder so I could work on it easily:

To get it to fit the hot shoe I trimmed off quite a section of the front, including some of the support, leaving the remainder short enough to push right into the finder. The sides were trimmed off similarly as was the small stop on the back edge, which fouls the camera otherwise. The final modification required was to cut slots in the edges of the foot with a hacksaw into which the edges of the hot shoe can slide:

That done it’s just a case of reassembling the finder and putting it on the camera:

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