New scope presents difficulties

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Olympusman
Posts: 5090
Joined: Sun Jan 15, 2012 12:31 pm

New scope presents difficulties

Post by Olympusman »

I noted in a recent post illustrating moss, that my faithful old Swift trinocular had become frustrating to work with. So I won a bid at shopgoodwill.com for an Amscope trinocular. It turned out that it is the same model as the scope I modified for cross-polarization macrography.
What this meant was 1) There was no sub-condenser filter holder (valuable for darkfield) and B) you had to pull a rod to change the image path from the binocular viewer to the photo tube (not ideal for stacking photography) (oh, but thank Olympus for Live View).

Confronted with the loss of my primary microscope, a microscope in development, and an old faithful cross-polarization scope, I decided to shut down my microscope lab for awhile and sort through all the components I had. There is a technique in large format photography called the Scheimpflug Principle which enables, by manipulating the various tilts and swings in a view camera to capture amazing feats of depth of field. The primary principle of the technique is that if you get lost, set everything back to the home position and start all over again. So, in rebuilding my lab, I first tested all the condensers Plus the filter holder was a major consideration.
Then I tested objectives using a micrometer slide for brightness, contrast, astigmatism and CA.
Then for each scope I had to find a photo projection eyepiece. Fortunately, I have a fine selection to choose from.
Lastly, is the camera mount relative to the microscope. To suspend or not to suspend? More testing.

Scaodactyl wanted to see the end result of the lab rebuild, so here it is:

The Lab
Microscope Lab 1.jpg
Microscope Lab 2.jpg
"New" Goodwill scope
New scope EP-1.jpg
Oddly enough, this scope came with 16X eyepieces, which I replaced with 10X optics. There is no filter holder in the condenser, so no darkfield capability. The camera tube uses an Olympus P10X projection lens, an Olympus OM Zuiko 50mm f1.8 set at f4 for a relay lens imaged by an Olympus EP-1. I may experiment with microvideography since the EP-1 has HD.

Superscope
SuperScope.jpg
This is my new primary scope. Years ago I bought his as a binocular phase contrast scope. I just wanted to see what phase contrast was all about. I thought all the haloing in phase contrast didn't suit my aesthetic and sold the phase contrast kit to one of our members and the scope became a low priority project. Every once in a while I'd look for a trinocular head on ebay and one day I found one from a Amscope metallurgical microscope. I won the bid. I already had a 12 VDC power supply.
The condenser has a filter holder so I have darkfield, brightfield and axial illumination.
The projection eyepiece is an Olympus NFK 5X LD, the relay lens an Olympus OM Zuiko 50mm f1.8 set at f4 and the camera is an Olumpus E-420

Cross-Polarizer
Polarizer.jpg
This is now my oldest scope. It's the same model as the Goodwill scope. It is setup for cross-polarization. An interesting note: At one point I thought I could put a polarizing film in the light path to the binocular eyepieces. Not gonna happen. The beam splitters in the binocular head twist the polarized light every which way.
The photo tube as a PH2 5X projection eyepiece. Don't know the brand. The analyzer rests atop the projection lens. The setup is afocal with the projection lens imaging directly to the sensor with no relay lens.

Metallurgical Scope
Metallurgical.jpg
This is the scope I have been using for some time to shoot computer chips. It is capable of shooting cross-polarization. The ToupView software that supports the CMOS camera is kind of clunky but often reveals surprising results.

I will say, it's nice to have my work shop back and also improved. I hope it may inspire some to reevaluate their setup.

Mike aka Olympusman
Michael Reese Much FRMS EMS Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, USA

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