Microscope Rig
I’ve had requests to show the rig I have been experimenting with. So consider this a first pass at this.
I am using a Chinese made (I am looking at importing and selling them in Australia, as the price is GREAT) stereo binocular microscope that seems to have very good optics. It is a zoom model with a 1-4x objective pair and a 10x eyepiece pair, for a normal coverage of 10x to 40x. I can swap eyepieces for greater or lesser magnification. It has the trinocular head setup so that the camera mounts to a third, vertical eyepiece, also a 10x at present though I will likely swap this for a specialist photo eyepiece at some point.
Below is a picture of the whole rig followed by a closeup of the camera section
The camera adapter is a unit I picked up locally that locks over the eyepiece tube and allows you to fit a standard 23mm eyepiece into its bottom. The upper section unscrews and at the very top you screw on an adapter for the particular lens mount your camera has.
For making the camera parfocal with the main viewing eyepieces (meaning you focus the main eyepieces and you know the camera will be focused too) I used a modified form of Charles Krebs’ parfocal procedure. I’ll write this up soon as Charles’ method was not appropriate in full for a microscope like this where the part with the camera attached is what moves when you focus.