I recently got a telescope, and I got a DSLR mount for it to take photos of astronomical objects. Ironically, after using both my DSLR camera and my phone’s camera to take pictures through the eyepiece, I found that I got better photos with the phone!

It was tough to keep it lined up with the eyepiece, especially while tracking objects in the sky, so I sought to create an adapter to hold my phone in place. I found a basic case design online and added to it. This is what I came up with in Onshape:

The case is intended to keep the phone’s camera centered on the eyepiece. Since eyepieces have a standard outer diameter, this should work for most of them. It’s also easy to slide the phone in/out of the case since I removed the bottom half from the design.

The design file can be found on the Onshape page here. 

I went to the local makerspace in the downtown library, and here is what the resulting 3D printed product looks like:

The printer I used did not use support material, so I split the design and glued the two pieces together, using the camera hole’s outline as an alignment guide.

The case design is pretty thin, so it ended up cracking on the left side. Thankfully, the phone still stays firmly in the case even with the crack.

Here are some photos I took with it:

Here is what the building looks like without the telescope (but with maximum digital zoom on my phone):

When the sky clears up, I’m looking forward to trying it with the night sky.