Key Concepts

• The base of a light microscope is located at the bottom and connects to the top via an arm.
• The light source in a light microscope can be a lamp or a mirror that reflects light from the room.
• The stage of a light microscope is where the microscope slide is placed.
• The top half of a light microscope contains three objective lenses with different magnifications such as 10 times, 20 times, and 50 times.
• The eyepiece lens in a light microscope has a fixed magnification and sits at the top where the user looks into the microscope.
• The body tube is located just above the eyepiece lens in a light microscope.
• The coarse and fine focusing knobs in a light microscope are used to help adjust the image in focus.
• In microscopy, the term object refers to the real object or sample that is being observed, while the term image refers to the image that is seen when looking down the microscope.
• Through our onion cells which remember us sitting there on the stage, we pass through one of the objective lenses, then through the eyepiece lens, and finally into our eye, looking into the eyepiece.
• The lenses spread out the light rays so that the image that we see is far larger than the actual object.
• Magnification is defined as how many times larger the image is than the object.
• If the image appeared 1000 times larger than the object, then the magnification would be times 1000.
• The equation for magnification is image size divided by object size.
• Resolution is defined as the shortest distance between two points on an object that can still be distinguished as two separate entities.
• The shortest distance that two parts of an object can be apart without appearing blurred is a measure of how detailed the image is.
• If we look at these two images of the onion cells from earlier, both have the same magnification because they both have times 100 in the bottom corner, but the cells in each image both look the same size.
• The one on the right looks much blurrier because it has a lower resolution, so we can't see the same level of detail.
• The higher the resolution of an image, the more details you'll be able to see and the less blurry it will look.
• The base of a light microscope is located at the bottom and connects to the top via an arm.
• The light source in a light microscope can be a lamp or a mirror that reflects light from the room.
• The stage of a light microscope is where the microscope slide is placed.
• The top half of a light microscope consists of three objective lenses with different magnifications: 10 times, 20 times, and 50 times.
• The eyepiece lens in a light microscope has a fixed magnification and sits at the top where the user looks into the microscope.
• The body tube is located just above the eyepiece lens in a light microscope.
• The coarse and fine focusing knobs in a light microscope are used to help adjust the image in focus.
• In microscopy, the term object refers to the real object or sample that is being observed, while the term image refers to the image that is seen when looking down the microscope.
• Through our onion cells which remember us sitting there on the stage, we pass through one of the objective lenses, then through the eyepiece lens, and finally into our eye, looking into the eyepiece.
• The lenses spread out the light rays so that the image that we see is far larger than the actual object.
• Magnification is defined as how many times larger the image is than the object.
• If the image appeared 1000 times larger than the object, then the magnification would be times one thousand.
• The equation for magnification is image size divided by object size.
• Resolution is defined as the shortest distance between two points on an object that can still be distinguished as two separate entities.
• The shortest distance that two parts of an object can be apart without appearing blurred is a measure of how detailed the image is.
• If we look at these two images of the onion cells from earlier, both have the same magnification because they both have times 100 in the bottom corner, but the cells in each image both look the same size.
• The one on the right looks much blurrier because it has a lower resolution, so we can't see the same level of detail.
• The higher the resolution of an image, the more details you'll be able to see and the less blurry it will look.