A New Favorite Microscope!

I finished up a camera mount to hold my D80 on the Nikon Alphaphot-2 and it works surprisingly well.  It took a bit of sawing, drilling, tapping, and silver soldering and as you can see the results were well worth the effort.  The poor spider shown in today's blog made the mistake of running across the counter when I was making coffee this morning.  I took the "whole spider" photo with my Nikon FS-3V slit lamp bioscope and the closeup is with my "new" system (don't you love the eight eyes)--zoom in on the microscope picture and you can see the spider on the stage.  I am going to have fun with this one!  I still have to take time to really clean everything up (you can still see soot and grime in the cracks), but the images so far look as good as one can expect for something that was declared unrepairable junk.  I wish now that I had done this last summer when it would have been easier to collect some pond creatures--this makes me anxious for spring to come!
The closeup was generated from 28 photos in Helicon Focus after prealignment and cropping in Photo Shop.