Required Practical - Microscopy

• The centre of the microscope has a stage
• The stage has clips to hold the slide in place
• Below the stage there is a lamp and the light passes up through the microscope slide
• Above the stage there are lenses, there are normally 3 with different magnification magnitudes of 4x, 10x or 40x
• The eyepiece contains the eyepiece lens which has a magnification of 10x
• The final parts of the microscope are the coarse focussing dial and the fine focussing dial.
• How to use a microscope

  1. Place the slide onto the stage
  2. Use the clips to hold the slide in place
  3. We select the lowest power objective lens - usually 4x
  4. We need to position the objective lens so it almost touches the microscope slide
  5. To do this, we slowly turn the coarse focusing dial - IMPORTANT that we look at the microscope from the side while we adjust the position of the objective lens
• How to use a microscope part2

  6. When the objective lens almost touches the slide we stop turning the dial - If we look through the eyepiece while positioning the objective lens there is a risk that we damage the slide

  7. Look down the eyepiece

  8.Turn the coarse focusing dial to increase the distance between the objective lens and the slide

  9. Do this till the cells come into focus

  10. Then use the fine focusing dial to bring the cells into a clear focus
• Total magnification = magnification of objective lens x magnification of eyepiece lens