INTRODUCTION TO MICROSCOPY

By definition, Microscopy is research using microscopes.
However, I believe that it does not have to be just research.
We could be satisfying our curiosity, about the condition of our blood, or searching for suspected pathogens in our blood, urine, or sputum. Or we might want to identify the Genus or the species of a mold growing in our fence or in a plant in our yard.

A good microbiology student or good microscopist should be familiar with the names of some of the microscope parts, or at least, we should know the difference between an objective lense and an ocular lense. I only use light microscopes, because electron microscopes and X-ray microscopes are too expensive and not needed for the things I look at.

Here is a good image of a light microscope with the names of their parts:


Most microscopes come with 10x ocular lenses (eye pieces) and 4 objective lenses. The objective lenses are normally 100x, 40x, 10x, and 4x. The total amplification provided by the microscope is equal to the ocular lense multiplied by the objective lense. Therefore, in this case, we have total amplifications of 1000x, 400x, 100x, and 40x. All the objective lenses, that I have seen, have a thin color band around the lense, to indicate their amplification.
Objective Lenses Color Assignments:
4x has a red band.
10x has a yellow band.
40x has a blue band.
100x has a white band.

I do not have the type of microscopes used to look at 3 dimensional objects, because most of the time I look at samples of my blood, my sputum, or some cultured pathogen or microbe, in a glass microscope slide.

I use two types of light microscopes, one is a tri-port that has a "warm" (yellowish) light source (Brand Name: AmScope). The other microscope has a "cool" (white) LED light source (Barndname: Swift). The white LED light , because of it's high frequency light, makes the digital Nikon, I use, add some light blueish tint to micrographs of unstained microscope slides.

Note: Photographs taken through a microscope are named micrographs.

I do not usually look through the ocular lenses (eyepieces). Instead, I look at a 65" Ultrahigh Definition TV screen, that I connect, via HTML cable, to a digital Nikon camera. The Nikon has a 10x microscope lense (same amplification as a standard microscope ocular lense), and the lense can slide (fit) into one of the ports of the ocular lenses, or to the camera port if it is a tri-port microscope. The camera has to be set to "manual", otherwise it will complaint about not being able to sense (communicate) with the lense.

Bellow is an example of micrographs taken with the warm light microscope and two micrographs taken with the white LED light microscope. Select (click on) the smaller images to see a larger version of the image.

       

For a better comparison of the white light vs. warm light microscopes, go to this link:

CUTANEOUS PARASITE

In the World Wide Web (a.k.a Internet) you can find a lot of data about microscopy.

There is a free, and very good, microscopy magazine from Austria called "Microbe Hunter"
Here is a link to it:
https://www.microbehunter.com/

And you can download back issues from here:
https://www.microbehunter.com/category/magazines/

And Wikipedia has a good description of Microscopy:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microscopy

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