rnabholz wrote:Hobbyst46 wrote:I like very much the 1st and 3rd photos. They provide a quite sharp 3D view.
For diatoms of this size, is 100X better than 60X/63X?
To my knowledge, there is not a 60x range objective offered for American Optical scopes, so I can't say that I have any experience to offer.
50 and 40x are the first steps down from the 100x.
I am not sure if your question is spawned due to the clipped edges in my framing or something you are seeing in the performance of the 100x.
If you want to clarify I would be happy to discuss. Thanks for the interest.
Rod
May I re-phrase the question. I am not trying to be smart, just asking from the practical point of view. And if it is overly nagging, please ignore.
I often dislike the 100X/1.3 oil immersion, because of its very shallow depth of focus (and shallow working distance), despite its offers high resolution (all due to the high NA) for single images. I prefer the 40X whenever possible. The 40X/1.0 oil immersion provides better depth of focus, albeit lower resolution of single images.
In stacked, the final observed resolution depend on several factors. I stack empirically, tailoring according to the appearance of the final result. The final observed resolution in your stacks looks like 0.3-0.4 micron (e.g. 140mm on my PC screen equals 51 microns, and the smallest visual distance between objects is about 1mm, so {1*51/140=0.36} microns). The green filter means wavelength about 0.55 micron; assuming that the NA (100X with iris, for DF, condenser, etc) was 1.2 (wild guess), the theoretical resolution of single images was 0.61*0.55/1.2 = 0.28 micron. So, perhaps an NA of 1.0 would be sufficient to produce the required resolution in a stack.
Or, to simplify the question further: would a 40X/1.0 objective yield the same visual quality in the final stack as a 100X/1.25-1.3? Of course not the same number of images, less might be required for the 40X than for the 100X?
those dark field shots are really nice - DF certainly provides a very attractive result with those diatoms.
