Simple Microscopes
A Short Tour
[Constantly Under Construction]
Leeuwenhoek Scope
Our class-made scopes will look like this one by Leeuwenhoek (1632-1723),
minus the fancy screw-adjusted specimen mount.
2008-Head of a Tick
David Leung's photograph using
the camera on his phone
looking through a simple
microscope made in class.
Not bad for a phone-camera, a
hand-made lens, and the total lack of focusing control.
By limiting the color spectrum
of illumination, the image would be sharper.
Here is a photograph I took of a
tick's head from a simple microscope in 12/2011.
The central "beak" is
broken because my specimen was really old and dry.
Here are some tick heads from
higher quality microscopes for comparison:
The image on the right roughly
corresponds to the photos above.
From: http://www.discoverlife.org/mp/20o?search=Amblyomma+imitator&guide=Arachnida
Here are some photos of a fly's wing taken in 12/2011 from a homemade simple scope.
Here are two movies of
"animicules" found in stream water.
These movies were taken using a
cheap Canon digital camera and one of my home-made simple microscopes.
I haven't spent a lot of time
trying to make videos of these animicules, so the quality of these is not
great.
[Click on images for movies.]
The
movie on the left is 21.8 MB and the one on the right is 9.5 MB.
These are the sorts of
microscopic creatures that Leeuwenhoek saw, and it sort of freaked him out.
The image dances about the frame
because I cannot get my camera close enough to the apeture to get a fuller
view.
So I move it around to survey
the general field. It's hit or
miss with my particular camera.
The LCD screen doesn't give a very high resolution image of what is
being recorded, so I was sort of flying blind. I caught these two creatures in the act. Without the camera, just looking with my
eye, I saw hundreds of little animules of many different shapes and sizes. I still have some work to do to get
better pictures. I imagine an SLR would
help a lot.
Here are some photos of the
manufacturing process.
Drilled Out Penny
I tap a gouge into the
countersunk depression and then sand the other side until I get an aperture
that I like.
I switched to copper flashing recently. It occurred to me that drilling a hole
in Lincoln's head was in poor taste,
and might be illegal. Let's just say I found these pennies,
pre-drilled.
Here is a short movie that shows the making of a lens.
[Click on image for movie.]
A Simple Lens
It's easy to make a tiny lens,
but they are very hard to use
– extremely short focal
lengths and the magnifications are too high to be practical.
I try to make my lenses as large
as I can. Two or three millimeter
lenses are relatively easy to make, but anything over that size starts to get
tricky– they don't stay spherical, they tend to have lots of bubbles in
them, they cloud over, they get a scaly surface. You figure, the more glass you have to look through, the
more possibility for problems.
I consider these to be medium to
medium large lenses.
I make a lot of lenses in a
session.
Unless the lens is obviously
clouded or bubbly,
you never really know how it
will perform until you mount it and take it on a test run.
I use 5-minute epoxy for
mounting.
The little glass tails are
helpful so that you can keep the glue off of the lens.
Once I have them provisionally
secured by the tail, I can then go back and carefully apply more glue
around the circumference of the
lens and/or apply some washers (as seen below)
to protect the lens from getting
knocked off.
My method is always changing.
I then put the mounted lenses
that work well into larger mounts for ease of use.
This is one of several styles of
mounts that I've come up with.
This one is on the large side, which
is good for supporting standard microscope slides,
but such a large mount can be
awkward against your face.
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