MicrobeHunter.com Microscopy Forum

And here a colony that stayed together in cleaning.

Bob

Hi Michael, it often helps to heat to 60°C for an hour or two. Then the blades might loosen up enough to move them. Usually the blade edges are still accessible when the aperture is fully opened. This allows the application of the solvents Doron mentioned above. Don't use force. Usually it is possib...

Hi Rob, with fresh plant stems I try to get 50µ sections (0,05mm). If this doesn't work I cut 100µ and work down from there until I get the least thickness of section without torn cell walls. With sleeve I meant the cylindrical component that sits on the back of the knife. A Type C knife is basicall...

I have used this method (usually with success) on lots of old camera apertures and leaf shutters. The contaminating grease or oil usually came from the circumference were grease on the blade actuator or other mechanics leaked in. This explains why the procedure has to be repeated often - one has to ...

Hi Rob, your article is very comprehensive gives a very good overview over the available sectioning techniques from simple to complicated. Also the images are very good. You must have spent lots of time to write, prepare, photograph and compile this article! Somewhere in the lower third you showed a...

Hi together, And here another picture. The long arms offer resistance in the water, as far as I know to reduce sinking. While the cleaning by incineration doesn't work too well it helps to keep colonies together as they are in fresh condition. The individual alge in a chemical cleaned material is fo...

Hi Jan, you can smear a bit of vaseline on a flat surface and scrape the cover slip endes along the surface. this leaves a tiny wall of vaseline that will seal the slide against the oil and stop the cover slip from moving. Then there are immersion oils of different viscosities. Obviously your water ...

I also had a lot of bubbles in the diatoms, which I had not experienced befor in this amount.

Hi together, this was a complete catch, including zooplancton. I think I saw parts of it reduces to ashes in the slide. This material is from dried out slides from yesterday and I don't know what harm has been inflicted by drying under the cover slip, centrifuging and incinerating at 450°C. I still ...

Hi Andrew, you might not even want the barlow lens. It offers additional pre magnification of the image and usually leads to empty magnification, bigger, but not more detail. Is that Microocular worth the effort to look for a barlow lens? It should have at least 1 Megapixel to be usable for general ...

The Zeiss plan objectives are calculated for a 25mm planar field of view, much more than typical chinese "plan" optics of today. These are very good objectives and they were very expensive, more expensive than the (semi plan) Neofluars. I recently bought a Planapo 100 (from an english seller, too). ...

Hi Marco, I think that there is a condenser, I can see the top lens in the images. But I wouldn't buy this microscope and would look very carefully at all other offers of this seller. Nearly 1000€ is a lot of money for a Zeiss Standard in untested and uncomplete condition. There is no lamp and trans...

Hi together, yesterday we had our group meeting in Hamburg and had especailly much fun in observing a placton sample, concentrated and conserved, from the northern atlantic, about 400km south of Greenland. today I washed the dried sample of tree slides, removed water and alcohol and cleaned the diat...

Hi Doron, it is my favourite micro photo so far, and not the result of well planned work but very improvised. I had to meet a deadline for the advertising for a group meeting where I was responsible for the practical part. This is just great radiolaria material in a petri dish on a piece of inner tu...

Very nice videos, thank you for posting them! These tardigrades are really interesting species with their 8 clawed feet. In the first part of the diatom video there are some black shadows in th background, not moving with the slide, maybe something on the field aperture or so. I liked how you improv...

The availability of microscopes and components depends on your local market too and at which price you could get things shipped to you. This varies from coutry to country. The Zeiss Universal is a very good microscope and many stands and components were made. So generally the availability is good. F...

Have you had a look here: http://www.science-info.net/docs/zeiss/ ? The Zeiss Universal can be used for incident light bright field, dark field and fluorescence. The needed incident light condensers are fairly common, but there are differences in the optical design that are difficult to find out. In...

Can you post a link of what you have in mind?
Do you think about a petrographic microscope?

Bob

Andy Ternay wrote: ↑

Wed Jan 15, 2020 5:04 am

determining if the petroleum ethers I could find were med. (medium?).

medical - this is quite pure and dries off without a trace.

Hi Marco,
if you are interested in blood slides you might have a closer look into the preparation methods. One trick is the proper spreading and heat fixating of a blood smear. The typical Pappenheim staining is a bit complicated for one time use, but there are other staining methods.

Bob

Hi together, the only use I can imagine for the 3d-printed microtome is in education of smaller children. The holding fingers are protected quite well. This is a common example for designs in 3d-print databases like thingiverse. Many models badly desiged, never even tested, useless gimmicks, problem...

Could the temperature change have caused the prism to separate? Yes. An acquaintance of me is caring for lots of microscopes professionally for decades now. He has developed the opinion that delamination is promoted by temperature changes, especially towards lower temperatures. Since this is quite ...

If this really is dirt on the surface this will be easy to cure. To avoid scratching the surface by rubbing dirt particles over it the cleaning should be done with very little pressure. A good first try is breathing on it an wiping with a piece of clean tissue. Very good and comparatively harmless i...

Hi together, I frequently use a Zeiss Jena dry Apo 40/0,95 objective with correction collar, very useful on my Phomi with Optovar (1,25x, 1,6x, 2,0x). At 500x combined magnification it gives a nice field of view and a very crisp image. At 640x image quality is still good, and detail is easier to see...

You might try to shine a flashlight through the eyepiece tubes and compare the output at the other end. That structure on your first photos - is that a piece of paper in the object plane? Sometimes differences from left to right come from delaminated prisms, but this here looks very special to me. Bob

Hi together, whether real research work is done or not - in my view it is always the question whether the output is in good relation to the damage. For the hobbyist the output can be to get more knowledge of nature, apreciate it more and spread this knowledge. This makes it acceptable in my eyes to ...

Hi Radazz, beautiful instrument and great photo! The quality of the micro photo is completely on the same level as what is shown here from much more modern instruments - very astonishing. The microscope design looks fairly modern. I have a Seibert microscope of the same age and it has a parallelogra...

Hi Andy,
med. petroleum ether is a nice cleaning fluid. It leaves not traces after wiping, cleans away general dirt and is comparatively mild towards plasics, mountants and lens cements.

Bob

Hi together, a lot has been written in this thread about the theoretical capabilities of this camera, but have more users bought and tested it and can review the practical capabilities in use on specific microscopes? The image quality is much more than only resolution, especially in use on the micro...

Hi Chris, older slides, fresh from the pack, sometimes don't fully clean up - they have developed a corroded surface. Cover slips are made from better glass and only rarely have this problem. So maybe you have a closer look before you use the slides for permanent mounting. For permanent slides I pre...