Scattered Thoughts . . .

When Lukey and I were using the microscope a week or so ago, I noticed a few nagging problems that needed to be resolved before I attempted another microscopy session and especially a session that included photography and/or videography.  I spent the past week or so trying to resolve these problems and thought it would be best to document it all here. My first problem was that what I was seeing on my camera (and on the 32" monitor connected to my camera) was not nearly as crisp as what I was seeing visually in the binocular eyepieces.  This was really frustrating.  I had been using my Sony a6000 camera in a prime focus configuration.  Prime focus imaging involves no additional lenses including eyepieces.  This type of imaging works very well in astronomy but I was not liking what I was getting in microscopy.  The images and video were very soft, sort of mushy, un-crisp.  They looked really terrible on the 32 inch monitor. The next problem was figuring out what I actually needed to

One morning while Lukey and Kenzie were with us last week, Lukey and I decided to spend some time with my microscope.  Kenzie popped in and out of the room a few times but spent most of the morning in Gee's office playing with her dollhouse as Gee worked.  Kenzie and I had a few microscopy sessions together in the past but today was Lukey's turn.  Kenzie was welcome to join us but she preferred to stick close to Gee and her dollhouse.  My desk is set up with all sorts of monitors for different tasks sort of resembling my own little Command Center and one of these monitors would be used to display what was under the microscope.  On this morning, we had one of my Sony cameras mounted on the trinocular of the microscope.  I used the binocular eyepieces for setting up each specimen.  Lukey viewed what the camera was seeing on a 32 inch monitor over my desk.  The view through the binocular eyepieces is far crisper than what is seen on the big monitor but this arrangement allowed us