What is a Light Microscope?
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by: sambrut24
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Word Count: 504
Date: Thu, 1 Dec 2011 Time: 12:14 AM
If you've heard of the term 'light microscope' then you may have been a little confused as to what this refers to. This has nothing to do with weight, but rather is to do with the way the microscope works, but this might be a lot easier to understand than you at first expect.
First of all, while the term 'light microscope' might sound confusing, in fact this is probably what you are already used to working with. A light microscope is the 'main' type of microscope that you probably encountered as a child, but this is something you might not have realized when you used it at the time.
Essentially a light microscope is a type of microscope that uses light in order to help you see the object. The light is shined through the object on the microscope slides and some of this is then absorbed by the item while the rest is reflected back. This is how we always see and how we differentiate between color and contrast – it depends on which wavelengths of the light have been absorbed and that dictates which ones we pick up in our eyes.
This light is also what allows the microscope to focus in and magnify what we are looking at though. This is because the light then heads up the microscope objective (the lenses at the end that pick up the light) and bounces around inside the top in order to reach our eye. Due to the shape of the lens in the objective, and the shape of the lens we look through, this allows the light waves to be bent and that in turn means that a few light waves that would normally hit our eyes together in a point instead fan out and cover more of our eye. In other words the information that those light beams contains is spread out and across our eye rather than being compressed together and this allows us to see a smaller area but much larger and more easily. As such light microscopes are successful in magnifying a range of objects kept on the microscope objective.
That all sounds very fancy, but why the term 'light microscopes'? Well essentially this is designed in order to help you to differentiate between other kinds of microscopes which include electron microscopes which instead use electrons in order to pick up much smaller details which then gets read by a computer. These are more used for industrial microscopes and for scientific study, whereas for most purposes the light microscopes are perfectly fine. What you maybe do need to understand though is the magnification, and whether it is a 2X, 4X or 1,000X will effect how much bigger the objects appear through the microscope objective. Likewise you might want to consider whether you want a binocular microscope, trinocular or monocular which refers to how many different lenses you get to look through. While binocular adds stereoscopic vision, trinocular allows a third party to look in and take notes as well.
About the Author
If you are looking for a student microscope, then a light microscope will suit most of your needs. Follow the links for more information on microscopy and to find microscopes.
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