Hotshoe mount for laser

cults3d

This is a hotshoe mount for a laser pointer. My use case is to attach a green laser to a camera to aid in pointing the camera for astrophotography, but you may find other photography applications for it. My laser pointer has a protruding button. The mount features an extra lip that can be rotated into position over the button and kept pressed down (be cautious not to blind anyone with the laser or leave it on when an airplane is passing). The mount is fully customizable so if your laser has different dimensions, or your hotshoe/printer has varying tolerances, you can adjust it. I used this to help with some basic photos I took at a relatively dark location. At 140mm zoom on a micro-4/3 camera, the precision of the mount and/or hotshoe was not enough to place the beam in the field of view. At more moderate zooms, the beam showed up clearly in the field of view - see the picture of the beam pointing to the Orion nebula. The pictures were one-minute exposures using an unmotorized barndoor mount. The green line is the laser. Note the faint meteor (I assume) track in the second image - I didn't notice it with my naked eye, but I was focusing on the mount and not the sky. I experienced some focusing difficulties which become apparent if you zoom in. Upon reflection, maybe the tip of the laser beam is far enough away to assist with that by allowing one to focus on it. At the time, I simply set the focus theoretically to the infinity range. The duct tape on the tip of the laser helps hold an IR block filter in place which I glued onto the pointer - my pointer was one of the inexpensive ebay ones without an IR block filter (which makes them much more hazardous as they emit more infrared light than green and can cause greater eye damage).