[anfractuosity]

It's an Olympus BHM that I got cheaply from ebay. It's a trinocular metallurgical microscope, that I added an old SLR to, for that photo. I noticed the semi-silvered mirror seems rather scratch though, so might need to look at replacing that.

[dylan604]

are you attaching the camera directly with an adapter, or is it projecting on to whatever lens you are using? i guess i'm coming at this thinking of it in terms of astrophotography using T-adapters to connect in place of on eyepiece vs taking an image from the eyepiece

[anfractuosity]

In the trinocular port, there's an eyepiece, which I forget the magnification of afraid. And to that port I added this - https://www.alanwood.net/olympus/photomicro-adapter-l.html and then used an OM to EF mount converter, which the Canon camera directly attached to.

I've since bought a microscope imager, that provides an output over USB. But I think I need to remove the OM converter, and get a shorter adapter to successfully attach to the microscope C-Mount.

[dylan604]

Thanks for that. I was hoping that would would be possible. I think I now know what to ask Santa for xmas!

[dekhn]

Either works, but trust me, the trinocular part is far superior, ergonomically. You do need to know whether you want a metalurgical scope or a compound light transmission scope. The former is good at looking at opaque samples, the latter for transparent samples (biological stuff mostly).

[dylan604]

that is something i have considered, but not known what terms to use to look it up. i would love to be able to look at opaque things in a highly magnified way, so the lighting issue is something i had in the back of mind. i do like the biological stuff in hopes of possible timelapse to show growth.

[dekhn]

This is what I have for general opaque and transparent stereo viewing: https://www.amazon.com/AmScope-SM-4TZ-144A-Professional-Trin...

then I get this illuminator: https://www.amazon.com/AmScope-LED-6W-Powerful-Gooseneck-Ill... for top-down viewing, and it can be adjusted for bottom-up illumination.

Then you can buy samples- microscope slides, petri dishes and samples,f rom places like Carolina Biological.

[dylan604]

You're my hero!!! I hear Santa's sleigh bells now!

[dekhn]

Enjoy. Personally, I buy tardigrades and algae and a petri dish and look at that. Rotifers are cool too, and both can be collected from the natural environment. But, I also use the same scope to look at PCBs and other small things. After a while I got tired of moving the sample around so I motorized it using CNC technology (g-code, stepper motors, linear stages) and then trained an object detector so the scope can just follow the tardigrade around in an area much larger than its FOV.

if I have seen farther, or closer in this case, then I would like to thank all the giant shoulders upon which I have stood (seriously- look up ernst abbe, he's amazing, he created the 8-hour workday!)