A Lesson in Microscopes

Microscopes are nuts. I got a lesson in microscopes today from a specialty microscope setup engineer from Olympus. He was setting up a IX71 inverted microscope in a lab, and showed me some of it's features. First of all, the optical cables that brought the light from the external light source were filled with a clear liquid, not the normal fiber optic cables. Cool, I never thought about doing that, but it makes sense. Second, it has two light sources, one regular white light, and the other is a UV light to use on fluorescing samples. Ahh, so that's how they do it. I always imagined a UV lamp was used externally. And then he showed me all the apertures, levers, a do-hickeys to get a image into focus. And then there's phase-contrast, which uses the shift in the phase of the light as it passes through an object to impart a higher contrast ratio to the image. Which makes cells look super crisp.