Today, I've made an adapter to build the microscope for live vieuw recordings. I have no immersion oil, hence the sharpness is limited and there are additional color errors. Nevertheless, the results are promising. I'm using the Planapo 40 / 1.00 Carl Zeiss lens for the tests. Here are some pictures...

I don't know what reasonable means. An oil lens used without oil produces a pretty fuzzy image both because the reduced NA and spherical aberration (some higher NA ones even don't produce an image at all). Oil immersion is easy to source. At this level you don't need top quality original oil, gener...

It will still be a mystery, nowhere does you find a picture of the internal of this "Somatoscope III zoom". Still, it works as a whole, I put my 2mm / 200 div slide on it and with the zoom at least I had an image of 100 um (10 subdivisions) on the monitor screen. With the zoom at max the FOV was abo...

No idea about the concentric rings device, is it placed at the condenser? BTW both both objectives are to be used with oil immersion as you likely know Thanks Pau for the help! I think you meant this: https://farm5.staticflickr.com/4468/37537862350_b2b36f0608_c.jpg P1017595 condenser by Frans , on ...

There is another ring in the table. Possibly this is for the drackfield application. At the bottom there is a small lens. Seems to bundle the light of the halogen lamp. I have no experience with that. Besides the central part there are some circles. https://farm5.staticflickr.com/4509/37762489402_e3...

...camera distance to bottom plate max: 415mm Loose use of the zoom term! It will not only give empty magnification but also lots of spherical aberration and with the Zeiss objectives CA due to the lack of compensating optics. Just the design that one would expect to get super-resolution :smt102 Th...

Thanks Pau and Ichty, Yes I have read the articles. The microscope stand is a normal version with above the somatoscope module. I have now opened the module. As indicated, just a B / W camera module with adjustable distance. No optic, no extra lenses internally. After examination of the camera modul...

Frans, check the labeling on that focus knob. I'm guessing that it's labeled in microns, but with only 10 divisions per 20 microns so 2 microns per division. --Rik Thanks Rik and Choronzon. There are 200 divisions on the fine knob. No more marks of units. So I need to check the real value. I'm goin...

Saved just before the dump for scrap. I'm still looking for data from the upper part of the microscope (Somatoscope III-zoom). There are 2 microscope lenses: Carl Zeiss Plano 40/1.0 Oel m.l. Carl Zeiss Jena HI 100/1.25 160/0.17 The microscope operates still outstanding, little used, and has a very h...

Wow, both of these are indeed ultra-clean and beautiful. :shock: Care to share what your setup looks like? :D Thanks! For the setup info look here: http://www.photomacrography.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=31252&postdays=0&postorder=asc&highlight=fotoopa&start=0 There is also technical info about the p...

Peter, Here is another one, it took 3 hours to acquire all images (2580 total). That should have gone faster. For me it would be 45 minutes including the file transfer to the PC. That would be a decent profit. I now use RAW files. With jpg files it would go even faster. I downloaded your photo and h...

Thanks everyone.
The little critters disappear quickly once the winter is coming. It is now looking for Other Subjects.
Frans.

Yeah that makes sense.

What I'm lucky, I live in a dead end street with no trafic, get my stack unit on the ground floor. Vibration I do not suffer from.

I've found that the jump from 10x to 50x is a bit too extreme in practice. So much so, it "justified" ordering a 20x Mitty after all. I didn't have to twist my own arm very much at all :) On its way... Very interesting posting. I think all weeks why should I buy the 20X or 50X Mit lens. Buying the ...

Super!

I would love to have that Mit 50X lens!