The original post has now been updated with information for the Leica Z6 & Z16 macroscopes, as well as for the Leica MZ16F & MZ16FA stereo microscopes.

Palaephatus

Hi Scarodactyl, What exactly is the 1.25x Y-tube? Looking in the sales material made me none the wiser, but possibly better informed (or overlooking the obvious). It looks as if the FOV with 10x oculars at 1x zoom factor is 18.4 mm. Excellent catch on the MZ16 data(!), which will be made into a sepa...

Hi Pau, The data on the AZ100 is from the "AZ100 technical handbook.pdf", the copy of which looks as if scanned from paper. According to the datecode I downloaded my copy in 2015. Attached to this post is a picture of a table from p40 - for some reason I cannot attach the pdf-file, which is at any r...

My thanks to both Ichthyophthirius and Macro_Cosmos for their very pertinent comments. Based on these I think that the Fluar 10x will for the time being come to rest next to other unusual (and doubtless, in the right setting, wonderful) objectives like the Beck reflex objective. I think that the tim...

Zoom stereo- and macroscopes are strange animals, when compared to compound microscopes. Based on a post by Scarodactyl the urge to dig out an old, and due to formatting problems never posted, text was rekindled.   For compound microscopes the numerical aperture (NA) is given exclusively by the obje...

Having acquired an uv-optimized (or optically primitive) objective, the Carl Zeiss Fluar 10x 0.50 NA (https://www.micro-shop.zeiss.com/en/us/shop/objectives/440135-0000-000/Objective-Fluar-10x-0.50), I am somewhat unsure about both usability (short working distance, 0.17 mm cover glass) as well as t...

The point about the objective having been subjected to high light flux/temperature may be a good explanation, Mitutoyo sells the Finescope 70 for both inspection and for laser cutting (1064, 532, 355 and 266nm, depending on the head) (https://www.mitutoyo.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/1799_FS70.pdf...

On the excellent homepage of Alan Wood one can find the brochure for the microscope in question (http://www.alanwood.net/downloads/olympus-bh-bha-bhb-bhc-brochure.pdf). On pages 4-5 are shown the optical construction. It would seem - from the thickness - that is not just a window to keep dust out. T...

If the lens seen works as a depolariser, it may already be made from quartz. One way of depolarising light is to use the so-called Lyot depolariser. This is constructed by having two plates of a birefringent material placed with their axis rotated 45 degree to one another, one plate being double the...

You may consider placing the lens in a vacuum; leaving it there for some time. I have - for somewhat similar purposes - used a small vacuum desiccator. The vapour pressure of the water will be rather low. Heating may speed the process, however, it may also promote problems with the coating and the o...

You may consider using a dehumidifier. During the non-winter part of the year I run one in my basement, a cheap model with a price tag of approx GBP 60 on sale. The model is compressor based (R134a refrigerant), uses some 300W of electricity and provides approx. four litre of water/day. The running ...