How to Use High Power Microscope
The high power microscope is also a high power tool in the life sciences laboratory. Stereoscopic or basic dissecting microscopes will not entail that you section your specimens, but they do entail that you know the different principles behind lighting and shadowing in order that you produce the best image possible from a three-dimensional specimen. Electron microscopes, despite their precision, are bulky, and will not allow you to look at your specimens while they are living.
High power microscopes strike the balance in between these two extremes by giving you good magnification with minimal damage to your specimen. Of course, due to the nature of your high power microscope, you will still need to section your specimen and make sure, at least in most cases, that it is properly stained. This is because light has to pass through your specimen before it reaches your eyepiece objectives, so any light blockage will make for quite an unsuccessful, if not inconvenient experiment.
High power microscopes are not only used in the laboratory, they are also used in medical clinics, schools, secondary school biology laboratories, and in the industrial arena. High power microscopes will often have four different objectives in rotation. One will be an extremely low power objective that will allow you to select your field of view for a large specimen, and the other will be a low power objective that will allow you greater focus on the part that you want to see.
The higher power objective will give a good deal of magnification, and the highest power objective, which is usually an oil immersion lens, will give the greatest magnification. This is accomplished by placing a drop of oil between the end of the objective lens and the specimen as it is being viewed. This keeps light from dispersing and provides continuity to the glass of the lens and the glass of the slide. This continuity also spells high magnification, and can mean more detail and, with prudent, good use, better imaging.
Good use of the high power microscope begins with good specimen preparation. Whether you are working with live bacteria in suspension or sections of tissue, you will need to mount the specimens properly onto slides. This can involve some degree of fixing or killing the specimen, which can often lead to malformations in cellular or tissue structures if you carry out fixing too vigorously or for too long a time.
As soon as you fix the specimen, you need to apply the appropriate stains in order to view it properly. For bacteria, the staining system may involve some rinsing and additional fixation, as well as applications of different solvents. For other tissues, the staining system may involve the use of single stains, but with careful measurement of their quantities, as too much staining can ruin a specimen and make it appear more a blot of color than a series of cells or sub-cellular organelles under the microscope.
When using your high power microscope, handle it carefully. Support the base with one hand and the body tube with the other. Do not hold on to removable parts of the microscope, such as the carousel containing the objective lenses, and the eyepiece objectives themselves. Keep your microscope in an upright position in a cool and dry place to avoid the entrance of molds, germs, and mildew that can lodge in your lenses and clog or blur them.
Make sure that your objectives are far away from the stage and will allow your hand to place slides in. Put your slide onto the slide stage and slip it under the slide clips. Start with the lowest power objective by placing the lowest power objectives over the specimen, then adjusting its height using the adjustment knobs. Look through the eyepiece objectives as you do this, but be aware of how far your objective already is from the slide, or you may end up cracking the slide and damaging your objectives.
As soon as the object comes into view, shift your objective lenses to one of higher power, and then use either the coarse adjustment knob or fine adjustment knob as you see fit. The coarse adjustment knob should guide you only in looking for the field of view that you want to look at, while the fine adjustment knob should present to you the specimen in greater detail. As always, be aware of how far your objectives are from the slide before making any sudden adjustments using the adjustment knobs.
For more information on how you can better use a high power microscope and how you can allow it to fit your needs without doing any great damage to it or wearing it out, you can visit http://www.high-power-microscope.com. You will be able to get all the information you need on available high power microscopes at a wide range of prices, as well as with different accessories and attachments that can enhance your work and improve your results.
