Magnification objective lensuses

Total magnification: In a compound microscope the total magnification is the product of the objective and ocular lenses (see figure below).  The magnification of the ocular lenses on your scope is 10X.

Low powerobjective lens

Resolving power or resolution: the ability to distinguish objects that are close together.  The better the resolving power of the microscope, the closer together two objects can be and still be seen as separate.

The Virtual Edge by http://www.uwyo.edu/virtual_edge/ is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License

High powerobjective lens

One way to change the refractive index is by staining the specimen.  Another is to use immersion oil.  While we want light to refract differently between the specimen and the medium, we do not want to lose any light rays, as this would decrease the resolution of the image.  By placing immersion oil between the glass slide and the oil immersion lens (100X), the light rays at the highest magnification can be retained.  Immersion oil has the same refractive index as glass so the oil becomes part of the optics of the microscope.  Without the oil the light rays are refracted as they enter the air between the slide and the lens and the objective lens would have to be increased in diameter in order to capture them.  Using oil has the same effect as increasing the objective diameter therefore improving the resolving power of the lens.

Please take a few minutes to fill out a brief survey about your experience using the Virtual Edge: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1yGbkF0KM92WBSk-IgS-EkjxkTKTQwhzuXmDsVpwRDoU/viewform

What isobjective lensin microscope

Polarcor™ UltraThin™ is a 30-micron glass polarizer that provides greater versatility for managing polarization in components throughout a telecommunications network and for developing high performance, cost-effective components. The durability of Polarcor UltraThin is similar to that of the standard Polarcor product. UltraThin is unique due to the thinness of the material, allowing low loss fiber-to-fiber and fiber-to-device coupling without expensive micro lenses.

Polarcor is made from a highly durable borosilicate glass containing elongated silver crystals aligned along a common axis. It has served the telecommunications market since 1984 and is the polarization material of choice for polarization dependant isolators used in DFB lasers for telecommunications networks. In the standard 200 and 500-micron thick product, polarization occurs within 25 to 50 microns of each surface; in the UltraThin product, polarization occurs throughout the entire body of the glass. UltraThin serves as a linear polarizer to reduce signal-to-noise ratio.

Parfocal: the objective lenses are mounted on the microscope so that they can be interchanged without having to appreciably vary the focus.

Immersion Oil:  Clear, finely detailed images are achieved by contrasting the specimen with their medium.  Changing the refractive index of the specimens from their medium attains this contrast.  The refractive index is a measure of the relative velocity at which light passes through a material.  When light rays pass through the two materials (specimen and medium) that have different refractive indices, the rays change direction from a straight path by bending (refracting) at the boundary between the specimen and the medium.  Thus, this increases the image’s contrast between the specimen and the medium.