Category: Optics

  • Countdown to a Revolution in Microscopy – Day 2

    I was supposed to write about bigger/faster/stronger today, but I don’t want to. Instead I want to consider culture. Companies absolutely have cultures, or rather, micro-cultures. Labs have cultures as well! One can consider in many ways a lab to be a small business operating inside the incubator of a university! So how does a culture […]

  • Countdown to a Revolution in Microscopy – Day 4

    What can’t your microscope do? Any user of a modern scope, or at least, a high end scope, considers the addition of new widgets. Whether it’s a better illuminator, adding a more sensitive camera, or even a motorized component, we think of scope upgrades,as…well…UP grades, yes? But in so many other areas of our lives, […]

  • Countdown to a Revolution in Microscopy – Day 5

    The foundational design of the compound microscope has, in many ways, remained locked in place for the 450 years of it’s existence. Combining an objective, eyepiece, and illuminator to provide a magnified view of a specimen has drastically improved. The illumination, staging, detection, optical design, and contrast methods have all evolved by leaps and bounds […]

  • Identifying Astigmatism in your microscope

      After all of the engineering and testing which goes into a microscope, you’d imagine that any manufactured scope would have perfect alignment of the optics. Believe it or not, in many cases things can be off! So how can you tell this? A simple test is to view a bead slide, or a grid slide, […]