MicrobeHunter.com Microscopy Forum

Black ant ... still testing the LOMO 10X APO

That looks very promising indeed !!

Some technical details of the set-up would be appreciated.

MichaelG.

MichaelG ... The so-called technical details are quite basic actually. I just used the LOMO 10X lens on my Olympus CH microscope ... I had to use a 7mm mounting spacer so as to get the objective to focus because the operating distance is different to that of the standard Olympus objectives so the magnification is obviously a little out. I also did not use the eyepiece in the home made camera mount tube. The olympus has a fine adjustment of 2.5um per marking on the dial and I used 8 points so 20um per exposure at 1/5 sec each... I think it was 52 images (Nikon D200) in total from memory. The lighting is from a 150 LED circular light source of I think, 8 watts (nothing marked on this LED fitting) mounted around 20 mm above the subject. The first time I tried it on this subject it was on a white card but this seemed to create too much light reflection back on the subject reducing the contrast dramatically so I changed the background to the blue color. I choose not to use live view on the D200 as it involves complications that I am not familiar with ... I do have a D300s that works with no other software on the Nikon live view control software but I prefer to use the D200 as a photo-microscopy dedicated camera.

Thank you ... that clarifies nicely.

The main reason that I asked was because I could see no reference to an eyepiece.

>> It is now clear that you did not use one ...

I also did not use the eyepiece in the home made camera mount tube.

... which makes the performance of the objective all the more impressive.

My Zeiss 4x PlanApo has a lot of 'chromatic difference of magnification' when used as a simple macro objective, and really needs a compensating eyepiece. ... That LOMO appears to be almost completely corrected.

MichaelG.

Very interesting. Thank you

MichaelG ... yes, the LOMO APO seems quite good. There is absolutely no modification to this image notwithstanding a couple of spots that appeared on the background due to exaggerated specs of dust on the ccd that I fixed with the rubber stamp in a generic image (PhotoFilter) program.