Viewing Metal Under A Microscope

Viewing metal through the microscope can be tricky. Not only does the surface reflect light and sometimes cause hot spots in photographs, but many times the metal is not a flat surface. When viewing items with uneven surfaces at a high magnification, it's important to keep in mind that you won't be able to have the entire object in focus at the same time. This is because the depth of field decreases as magnification increases.

Metal can be viewed with either a stereo microscope or a metallurgical microscope. Stereo microscopes typically provide about 10x-50x magnification. A metallurgical microscope provides much higher magnification of 100x, 400x and sometimes 1000x. In a metallurgical microscope the light comes down through the objective lens to ensure the specimen is illuminated.

This metal slotted gear was captured using a 150w halogen dual pipe illuminator and a SMZ-168 stereo microscope at 40x magnification. Notice how parts of the gear are not in focus because the gear does not all lie on the same flat plane.

Microscopic Worms

Check out these microscopic worms. Out of all known and studied worms, these have the DNA closest to human DNA.

Images were captured directly to the computer using the MC2300 3.0 mega pixel microscope camera on the SMZ-168 stereo zoom microscope with a 1.0 C-Mount Adapter. Images were captured at 100x magnification.

Coin Collecting Microscopes

Coin collecting requires good optics and low magnification in order to fit the entire coin in the field of view. You can view a variety of coin collecting microscopes here.

These images were all captured with the SMZ-168 stereo microscope with 5x eyepieces. The MC1000 microscope camera was mounted over the 5x eyepiece in order to have a lower magnification. This same result could also be obtained using the 10x eyepieces and a 0.5x auxiliary lens.