Category: Optics
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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…
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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,…
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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…
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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,…