Emarth Spotting Scope IMX291 Camera Module

thingiverse

A camera adapter to mount a cheap IMX291 USB camera module to an Emarth 20-60x60AE Spotting Scope. The IMX291 image sensor is relatively affordable and is supposed to have a bit better low light performance than most other commonly available starlight / starvis camera sensors aside from some of the analog drone fpv cameras. The phone adapter that ships with the scope is pretty bad, and I really wanted to be able to manipulate my phone without touching the scope itself and possibly knocking it out of focus / off target. Link to the camera module. I used the 8mm lens. I'd wager that most of these similar camera modules would work, but I haven't tested any others. Should be easy enough to remix this design to accommodate other cameras. https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005001998432509.html Link to the spotting scope. You can get this for around $51 if you're patient and wait for a sale. https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B010FAUJ46 If you have another scope and can send me the dimensions of the eye piece I'd be happy to modify the design to add geometry that accommodates your scope's eye piece. The eye piece geometry isn't a straight cylinder, but is a very slightly tapered cone ~1.5mm diameter taper from 29mm > 27.5mm so it can better fit itself around the rubber on the end of the eye piece. Photos are of a pumpkin on my neighbor's porch about 190' from when the scope was placed with 20x zoom and 60x zoom. Night photos are a comparison of the low light performance I can get out of a Logitech c270 vs the IMX291 camera module. Photo of the moon were taken with guvcview. Scope was at about 42x zoom. Exposure was turned down nearly all the way, gain and gamma were turned to their lowest settings, brightness was slightly reduced and contrast slightly increased. Here is also a brief video sample of the moon. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HzOv26wv_T8 All the parts fit together well and mount to my scope and camera module reasonably well. I think its good enough for now, but I may make more tweaks to the design later on as I can come up with useful changes.