Weird American Optical base

[Timemaster1212]

So while surfing the internet, I spotted this base, and was lost. Can anyone she'd some light on it?

[desertrat]

Looks like an accessory base with built in illumination designed for the older horseshoe based scopes with mirrors for external illumination. Notice the A/O 2 series scope had to be mounted in the universal clamp a bit crooked to get the illumination to line up with with the scope's optical train. The base was probably designed to fit a large number of different makes of the older scopes.