MicrobeHunter.com Microscopy Forum

Hello! Is there a cheap and simple way to make tardigrades' surface opaque, so that cuticle morphology can be easily observed, obtaining images somewhat similar to SEM electron microscopy? In principle, I could use vacuum sputter coaters that deposit gold or palladium or carbon on samples for SEM. B...

Hi all, I'm wondering what is the magnification factor of twist-type (Seidentopf) bino heads on 160 mm microscopes? Or rather, are there any 1.0x heads of this type? The optical path length on these looks outwardly to be so much longer than on slide-type (Jentsch) heads that it can't possibly keep t...

In amateur astronomy, one can now buy a 100 mm diameter objective employing "ED" (extremely-low dispersion) glass as one of the doublet's lenses, plus the optical tube and focusser, for about 800 EUR (ordinary achromatic doublet costing 1/3 of that). It offers massive improvement in chromatic aberra...

Since used Nikon epi-illuminators are unfortunately too expensive for my budget, I was thinking of using one of the eyepiece ports of my Nikon YS2-H's bino head as an illumination port (with LED). But the reflection of the illuminating beam on the beam-splitter face drowns out the image coming up fr...

I would think some ingenious tools or jigs were used for iris assembly. The "machines that make the machine" are often more interesting than the products! Regarding the iris guy or iris gal question, watchmakers used to be man, weren't they? So fine motor skills are not gender-specific. The prevalen...

I'm wondering which Chinese 160 mm objectives to choose for cheap epi-illumination to minimize back-reflections: achromats or planachromats? Achros have fewer lenses (less back-reflection), but planachros probably (just my guess!) have better anti-reflection coatings, since they're a higher class pr...

My YS2-H also has this problem, in addition to the lamp changing brightness on its own randomly. I'm going to change the lamp first, as it's old and the manual suggests it might be a symptom of the lamp approaching failure. Lamp is about $ 2 in my country.

I wish you good luck with your scope!

Hi, I have a pair of eyepieces made by Meopta Czechoslovakia in the 1960s (?) labeled "O 10x". Would someone happen to know what the letter O could mean? Other eyepieces Meopta made are obvious - H for Huygens, K for compensating, P for projection or photographic or maybe periplan. Meopta used to be...

80lm/W instead of 160lm/W sonds quite ok, no reason not to use it for this application. At 2700K it might be a bit yellowish for a nice visual impression, but this is personal taste. This might be a good place to mention that the highest theoretical efficiency for making warm white light with a LED...

Sorry, I am not clever enough to explain this diagram succinctly . 5E5452B7-EAD6-49FE-8D28-40FBE176A308.jpeg . MichaelG. It says that some leds you get will be pinkish, some greenish, and if you pay premium you can get the whiter ones (bins), those near the white curve that goes from left to right....

… if we can identify the chip manufacturer, the should be available [somewhere] on a reel The search is on !! Look, the EMOS bulbs are available on German Amazon! I thought EMOS only sells in Czech Republic. https://www.amazon.de/Colour-Rendering-Replaces-Neutral-Lifespan/dp/B07YNVJX7X?ref_=ast_sto...

That giant 63x objective is really RMS/DIN? :) It dwarfs the entire microscope... The bulkiness of today's objective bodies hides the diminutivness of the lenses inside... Altogether, I feel awe and respect. The hardwood case indicates how laborious and expensive it was to do even a toy/hobby micros...

That is a nice spektrum, jjtr1! If this is from a single die it would be very interesting to investigate further. Many microscopes don't have a true Köhler setup but a frosted lens in the light path that acts as the light source. In this case multiple LED dies could be used. Colour enlargers used t...

Nice spectrum, but certainly that spectrum is not produced by a single die, or even a single COB led. It is probably produced by a combination of many different LED dies. For microscopy, we need a single die, or a fairly small COB led. The Yuji and Optosolis COB leds are the closest thing that I've...

An unfortunate aspect of cheap led illumination systems is the loss of information due to the limited number of spectral lines that they produce. The eye has evolved to utilize the full spectrum of daylight in order to be provided with the maximum amount of information available and while no artifi...

About 8:30 into this : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GuCdsyCWmt8 (peeled it off with sticky tape). :-D Sticky tape for CDs and Xacto knife for DVDs. Sometimes brute force wins over fine optics :) I might try that. I was wondering that maybe if I shortened the optical tube, I could extend the work...

There was a sort of standard developed by the manufacturers of toy/hobby microscopes from the 50's onward in Japan, sold widely through dept. stores. Objective thread was normally hitched to the size of the body of the scope and that was hitched to it's magnification. 300X, 450X, 600X, 750X, 900X, ...

I don't know if these are of any interest to you. I ran across them on ebay while looking for a 100x oil objective. They are 15mm mount. Those are exactly my little scope's objectives :) Ufortunately, no 20x is on sale. But I have at least found this old 15 mm set with engraving instead if printing...

Hi, I'm wondering if there is a cheap way of viewing the pits and lands of a DVD disc. The problem is that the data layer is buried 0.6 mm below surface. 40x objective usually doesn't have sufficient working distance. Is there a way other than buying an expensive LWD objective? DVD, CD and Blu-ray p...

Greg, thank you for the info! The 4x and 10x are usable (within say 12 mm field), but the 40x is junk (even with the illuminator (also junk) fixed to fill the 40x's aperture). 40x is probably too demanding for the substandard manufacturing, but 20x could be ok. PeteM, I also have a Nikon Alphaphot-2...

Hi, the objectives on my student's microscope (not a toy, but very short - just 25 cm) are not RMS nor DIN - the thread is 15 mm dia. and parfocal distance is 32 mm. (Tube length is hard to measure because of the 45 deg. prism.) Would someone happen to know whether this was some antique objective st...

I imagine that an erecting head could be constructed by simply substituting the wedge prism that tilts light path by 45 deg. with a roof prism (Schmidt-Pechan prism pair, as in straight binoculars, but without the wedge part). It would add about 20-30 mm to the light path. https://en.m.wikipedia.org...

Hi,

do erecting binocular heads (i.e. ones that provide non-inverted image) for microscopes (not stereoscopes) exist? Why aren't they more common? Are they possible with 160 mm finite systems (light path inside the erecting prism(s) might be too long)?

Thank you for your answers

More of a thick meniscus lens. The design's first iteration was probably this Zeiss patent from 1938 invented by Hans Boegehold. It shows up as a scattered design feature until the 70's, afterwhich it was widely used by at least 5 mfg. I can think of during that decade. https://patents.google.com/p...

jjtr1, does the rear element of your objective appear to have a concave surface (and appear to be made out of a thick slug of glass) ? ....a bit like the PlanAchro's in abednego's illustration. The rear lens of my 40x is concave and lies right at the end of the barrel, as in NCF PlanAchro. Hard to ...

Nice observation. That 40x objective at NA0.65 wouldn't require a embedded first element as used in high NA objectives (i.e. NA1.40), so it is made to be concave at the first surface and isn't missing anything. The surrounding donut of frosted glass should have been initially blacked out with a thi...

I'm afraid I don't know the answer to your question. It may be there's a metal annulus behind the front lens? Also, I'm not sure that it's strictly a CF lens. I've seen a number of lenses around (some very cheap) that are marked as Nikon and are finite 160mm RMS. Many are contemporary e.g. https://...

Hello, I'd like to share here an intriguing design of the first lens of my Nikon CF 40x achromatic finite objective (1990s). The tiny lens, instead of being mounted in a metal tube, seems to be mounted in an annulus of ground or frosted glass representing most of the objective's front end area. Pict...

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I may be wrong but I think Jena was still using an achromat : correcting eyepiece and apochromat : compensating eyepiece system. Systems adopting a compensating condition for both arrived on a staggered basis mfg. by mfg. from the 60's onward. AO were the first or at least one of the first to harmo...