MicrobeHunter.com Microscopy Forum

Could one put seperate cameras on the viewports and camera port on a trinocular head, each one at a slightly different focus, and then run a script and focus stack the three into one super awesome video?
(I bought a new 10x eyepiece and if I use that and my old one on my binoc head and they focus on slightly different planes somehow. Gave me the idea.)

Placozoa wrote: ↑

Tue Feb 23, 2021 7:45 am

Could one put seperate cameras on the viewports and camera port on a trinocular head, each one at a slightly different focus, and then run a script and focus stack the three into one super awesome video?
(I bought a new 10x eyepiece and if I use that and my old one on my binoc head and they focus on slightly different planes somehow. Gave me the idea.)

Assuming you had a trinocular head which allowed using both the eyepieces and the photo tube simultaneously, I suppose you could. At that rate you could stack on dual viewing attachments / beamsplitters and capture from those, but there would be losses in intensity at each step. As for the dual viewing attachment, there's a thread here where someone used (I believe it was an AO 10/20?) a dual viewing atttachment and adapted the camera to mount where the second head would have.

It seems like it would be theoretically possible but the image registration at each camera would need to be dead on. I suppose a helical focuser in advance of each camera could be employed to equalize the image size exactly.
Miller was selling an N.O.S.( maybe a demo) 14 station Diastar until recently on ebay . i

I think the word calibration comes up as an important factor, which probably implies precision in the z axis. I used the term registration in which I meant precision in x and y.

Focusing at the eyepiece end instead of the objective end will cause a change in the scale of x and y, as z changes. I think this happens even when focusing normally, but if not then software could easily deal with this issue and only slightly degrade the images. It sounds like its not that hard and people do it, at least for fancy research stuff, but no videos posted of the results that I could find. I really really want to see a focus stacked 'journey to the microcosmos' style video.

Has anyone else found any videos that are using this technique?

Precision really matters.
Especially cause I have been shaky and my hands not been stable. But now I'm trying.

It’s a nice whimsical idea … but I think you would do better to physically focus on one ‘channel’ and extract frames from a stream for your stacking.

Zeiss does this in a market-sector which I cannot afford to enter

MichaelG.