My Scopes and my source of Pond-Life...

[hb2sbdb]

Hello everybody

I finally got the time to share some pictures of my equipment as promised in another thread.

For the spirit of..doing less work I'll also combine the introduction part into this post

I'm in Rhode Island, the smallest state in US. It takes less than 1 hour to drive across the whole state, so a lot of you probably had passed it without even noticed

How I got into microscopy hobby:
I started about 10 years ago with a Wild M3Z Stereoscope with my kid.

Working as a computer graphics engineer at the time, I tried to make sure that we started with something with good image quality that won't turn us off quickly, and easy to use and service, so I did a fair amount of research before getting the M3Z, and it is truly a great scope.

Wild M3Z:


We used the M3Z to look at bugs, and to perform...autopsy on our aquarium fishes, another of our hobby

I later acquired an Zeiss standard, then swapped with a WL body sometimes after.
Zeiss WL:

The Zeiss is equipped with basic BF, phase, and dry dark field condenser




My most-used microscope (90% of the times) is the inverted Zeiss ICM-405 equipped with LWD Phase and Hoffman Modulation optics.
ICM405:





We enjoyed looking at all sorts of life forms in our aquariums, but also from the...fear of something maybe "scary" in the water.
At the time, we had up to 10 fish tanks around the house (mostly in basement) with some exotic fishes, that we know for sure, were wild caught from Amazon river, and some from the Far East. I imagined the wild fishes were likely imported along with some of the "native" water, or at the least, any...local parasites within their bodies, so I was a bit concerned when cleaning the fish tanks. Many of our tanks had plants, such as the one below, so they required more hand/arm dipping than a bare tank when servicing:

Fishtank:


I really like the convenient of the inverted scope, where we can identify things/creatures quickly and directly from water sample in a petri dish. HMC and Phase is also good with the plastic bottom material.

Anyway, the kids grew up, moved out of the house. My fish tanks are down to 2 now. However, the number of microscopes have been increasing, and I finally...took over our dinning room

A few years ago, I acquired a Olympus BHS trinoc:

Olympus BHS:


It came with D-Plan objectives, 1.25 BF condenser, a Fluorescent system with 3 different cubes, but minus the power supply for the mercury lamp. I thought about switching to Olympus completely (had a fair share of delamination). But after a while, I realize I may never be able to find, or can afford a BH2 DIC system. Heck, even Phase is quite expensive that I'm still trying to look for a reasonable set. The BH2 system also came with the original film photographic system that I plan to update sometimes. My camera gears are mostly Nikon, so even if I pay premium price for an OM-L adapter, I would still have to do some hacking with it. So, that will be my long term project. For now, I'm enjoying my Zeiss systems with BF, DF ,HMC and phase. I do have NFK 2.5 and 3.3x the BHS however. I'm also using a 0.7 HMC condenser with 10x and 20x HMC objectives on the Olympus. Not sure if the HMC condenser was exactly for Olympus (or Nikon?), but it fits nicely. The BH2 optovar is also very convenient for aligning the HMC modulator and slit. I think it is more solid design than the Zeiss optovar.

I also have a BHMJ with full set of NeoPlan objectives and a Nikon SMZ645 which I paid (both) for less than the price of an ebay BH2 LWD phase objective. With the 2x auxiliary lens, the Nikon SMZ645 can provide higher range of magnification than the M3Z, but the M3Z is still a pleasure to use. The BHMJ supports bright field, dark field and Polarized reflected light. It also has a Semprex base for low-res transmitted BF/DF as well. This scope is great for looking at coins or stamps.

Nikon & BHMJ:


I'm still working full time, so I can't really spend much time with my hobbies, but I hope that I can retire in a few years, then I'll even have more fun with my equipment. I've found many protozoans over the years just inside those fish tanks, and only had made a water collection outside of my home once. However, I have been quite active lurking microscope forums and Science, Yahoo microscope newsgroups for years, and very much enjoying the posts, photos and videos shared by members.

I haven't gotten much into photomicrography (have not owned any APO objective yet ), but occasionally I do record videos of my Aquarium micro life that I can share with the forum sometimes. I'm also thinking about checking out "Pond life" from the ocean, which I have not done. As mentioned earlier, RI is very small but that means anyone in the state can get to the ocean in less than 1 hour, and it is about 15 minutes in my case. So this is something I can do easily if I want to... Oh I just wish that I'm already retired

Thank you for reading

[75RR]

That is a nice group of microscopes. Good to see they are all used. Agree that Zeiss delamination is a PITA

[KurtM]

Awright! Great post, and sure to generate some serious microscope envy, I love it! Bonus points for extolling the many virtues of stereo scopes, particularly as a first instrument!!

The aquarium talk is nostalgic, I used to keep fish tanks. Travel too much to have any now. Sure miss 'em. Microscopes can really earn their keep with fish tanks and home breweries/wineries.

[zzffnn]

hb2sbdb,

Please let me have your video channel's web page, I would like to see those protists from your aquarium.

You have a very nice collection.

Do you have a boom arm zoom scope, have you used it for looking into aquarium? I used to keep aquarium too, but did not have any scope at the time. If I do it again, I would use a boom arm zoom (like a B&L StereoZoom 7 or similar) to look into aquarium.

Have you seen lots of ciliates in your aquarium? I am just curious.

Your WL needs DIC

What is your highest HMC magnification for ICM-405? 20x or 40x? Do you like to use HMC, over oblique? Do your HMC achromats have high amount of color artifacts?

[Johann]

That was an enjoyable read Great post.
Time to get DIC into your setup

[hb2sbdb]

Hi Kurt

Just want to get more points for stereoscope usage :
My other regular usage is for my other fishing hobby (we never have enough of them )
Not into fly-tying yet, but the scopes are great for examining all the knots on my rigs, and how sharp the hooks are, and I check them quite often.

My fish tanks now are very low maintenance. Still have plants but they all have low-light requirement. The fish there can go weeks without feeding. They actually look better after each of my long trip, since we tent to overfeed them when we're around. The occasional "fast" periods actually help, and the plant ecosystem provides a good food backup source.



To answer zzffnn:

My highest HMC objective is 40x. 20x and 40x are the most useful magnification for what I'm interest in. I like HMC since it is more consistent than oblique (that we don't need to fiddle to get the "right" effect as oblique, although HMC is mostly colorless).
I do get color fringing with my systems. Not sure how to describe the level. I'm quite used to them (not very picky at this point Maybe you can judge them when I start posting some sample videos.

BTW, when using HMC condenser (and its polarizer) with regular or phase objectives, I sometimes can get nice oblique effects. Just have not explored/experimented with it enough.

I don't have a video channel yet. My videos over the years are scattered in my various computer hard drives. I'm starting to try to organize them, lot of them from early years with the kids that the cameras (and cellphones) were not that good.

We don't look directly into the aquariums with the big stereoscopes, but used a varieties of (cheap) portable scopes, and good quality hand magnifiers to look at the water NEAR or ON the aquarium wall. For other areas of interest, we would the suck the surround water into the petri dish and examine on the stereo or inverted scopes.

I encourage our members to keep fish tanks, especially if we are in cold climate. I use my scopes mostly during the winter when we don't have much to do after work, or at night. The fish tanks are where I got my samples from. I can find many different ciliates, flatworms, algae, and bacteria. I think I have identified over 50 of them. From various types of "common" stentors, amoebas, to large predators such as litonotus, loxophillum, etc., and some others that I have no idea what they are. I think it helps from the fact the my tanks are very mature. They have been running for over a decade without water completely drained (only change 20% of water at a time, with some fish are 10, 15 years old). I make long tubes to draw water at different levels, under the gravels, on the plant leaf, or at the base of the plants. Multiple tanks produce different "set" of critters. And from the original samples, I can "grow" different sets by just keeping the water in petri dish for weeks with some rice grains or fish food...

The fish are also mostly low-maintenance pets that we don't have to walk them daily, unless you keep an eel, or...walking catfish

[gekko]

Awright! Great post, and sure to generate some serious microscope envy, I love it!

Yes! On both counts Thanks for the very interesting and nicely illustrated post.

[Oktagon]

That's a lovely looking early black WL and a serious ICM-405. I have very similar collection, although my primary user is Universal. I find the ergonomics of ICM-405/IC-35 to be a little strange, with stage controls on semi-flexible stack overlaying focus knob. ICM-405 also requires long WD condensers, unless you want to lower it all the way tot he slide. I use my ICM-405 mostly for reflected light work and epiflourescence, my scopes are even positioned in two different places, Universal sits in my home office, while ICM is in the lab I have equipped in the basement. I have quote a bit of accessories for both, so for the most part they have their own kits, shearing only DIC equipment and camera body (can't afford two Canon 1Dx bodies lol). For stereos I have Wild M5 and Zeiss Jena OPM1.
I have other scopes as well, but these are the users.

[charlie g]

Thanks for sharing your family of stands, 'hub to subdub'! Great to hear some of your paths to these stands, it's great to hear of your 'work horse' stand.

I see Kudo's 5th edition there amongst your readily available texts...wow..ten tanks at one point...that's a lot of water changes! That richly planted tank you show..did you pump CO2 into it to get that density of plants?!

Thanks for this treat of (some of your!) your stands. charlie guevara, finger lakes/NY

[hb2sbdb]

Thank you Charlie,

Yes, I did pumped CO2 into the tank during that time, but just from the "DIY yeast+sugar bottle" method. The "stair" plastic structure on the left, back side of the tank is the bubble dispenser that connected to 3-litter bottle of the yeast/sugar solution in the back. That was a fun time experimenting with all kind of aquatic plants and...burning electricity like crazy from hi-intensity compact fluorescent growing lights. We are also using a lot of high power lamps with the microscopy hobby, but it is nowhere near the continuous 10-12 hours a day with those plant tanks! And it was easy to maintain 10 tanks with the help of the kids (when they were still interested!).

Hello Oktagon,
From your early posts, I recognized that you had similar equipment, and that you're quite experience in this field, so I've been very interest to follow all your experiment, comments and progress. Yes, I'm also not crazy about the Zeiss invert's weird, 2-section stage controller, but I guess it has to be that way for not jamming the control knob when the stage is at certain location. However, probably because of this design (which employs internal steel cable instead of solid shaft that may take some rotational inertia before it gets going), I feel that i don't get the precise control as other stage controller...

Sometimes on eBay, I saw what looks like a different stage controller (appear to be singe-section shaft) on those Zeiss inverted scopes. I wonder if anybody has any experience with that stage controller (which could be a little short that our arm won't rest comfortably when using the scope for longer period?)

[hkv]

Great collection and interesting post! I am especially impressed by

and I finally...took over our dinning room

I guess many of would like to do that...