I mentioned in my introduction post that I was hoping to get advice on adapting a digital camera (an older Canon EOS) to my american optics 580 microscope head. Einman suggested I get a dovetail adapter from RAFcamera on eBay, and I gave that a try. I picked up a 43mm dovetail to 42m threaded mount, plus an adjustable length extender an a 42m to canon adapter. The dovetail finally came in today, and I realized that I'd badly mismeasured the diameter (probably something wrong with my digital calipers)--the actual diameter is more like 41.5mm at the top, and it looks like it tapers in a bit as it goes down too. The depth of the AO port also appears to be significantly deeper than the dovetail adapter, so I'm not sure how well one with the appropriate diameter would fit.
![Image](https://i.imgur.com/Ys48QNd.jpg)
![Image](https://i.imgur.com/YfToOsA.jpg)
Fortunately though I have a drill press and free time on a thursday so I was able to make some adjustments (pictured in progress):
![Image](https://i.imgur.com/OKK1Jpj.jpg)
A horrible thing to do to such a beautifully made part, but I wasn't about to ship something that inexpensive back to Russia. Anyway, I got it to the point that it has a nice snug fit, though I will probably do a bit more later to get it perfected. One way or another though it was fit well enough to put on my test camera to get some photos. Here are my test photos, each a stack of 6 photos done in Helicon (subject is a negative crystal filled with petroleum and a methane bubble inside a quartz crystal).
With the canon:
![Image](https://i.imgur.com/aI05vv8.jpg)
Freehand with my phone through the eyepiece:
![Image](https://i.imgur.com/xOUvYwL.jpg)
Unsurprisingly the area is way smaller through the adapter, since it was meant for a polaroid camera. However, cropping out the appropriate section of the phone photo shows the canon does take a better picture:
![Image](https://i.imgur.com/aXXk2Wb.jpg)
That's not entirely fair, though, since I could increase the magnification to get a better shot through the eyepiece.
I have a feeling that adding a reducing lens would be a real pain to do and probably degrade the image significantly. As-is the mismatch in sizes is kind of annoying, but this could still be useful for getting shots of some mineral inclusions.