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I ordered a microscope for my wife's birthday, and I'm just wondering what should go with it. Slides (with depressions?), stains, microtome, or what? I don't know that I made a good choice of microscope (I should have checked here first), but it's a Celestron 44340 LCD microscope ($157 from Amazon). It comes with a few sample prepared slides.

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Greg

A big kiss.

Peter.

Well, thanks anyway.

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Greg

Greg, apart from the microscope itself and some glass slides and cover slips, there is really very little specialist equipment that you will require before you can start exploring. Most items you have lying around the house already. With a bit of practice, one can make surprizingly accurate sections of plant stems, leaves etc using a sharp razor blade. You will need collection bottles for wet samples, and empty medicine containers are great for this. A pair of tweezers are handy. If you see nylon mesh of different stains, pack this into your kit as well. My eyes these days don't function like they used to without proper lighting, so a bright desk lamp when preparing slides is required. Paper towel - lots of. You could try to stain cells with food colouring. You may also consider culturing your own critters in shallow dishes filled with rainwater and seed stocked from water obtained from an expidition.

You can read through the other sections in this forum for more specific solutions.

Btw, judging from the nature of this excellent gift, I assume the "big kiss" was forthcoming anyway.

Thanks for the suggestions, Mintaka. A nylon mesh of different stains is a bunch of small containers of stains sold together in a nylon mesh bag?

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Greg

Sorry typo - I meant different strains. A fine nylon mesh for filtration puposes, i.e. to remove large particles from your watery samples.

Droppers and/or syringes are also a must, and are usually available cheaply at pharmacies.

Slides, coverslips, droppers, and a few commercial prepared slides. There are sets of new commercial prepared slides available on ebay for what works out to be less than $1 usd per slide. I think that sets of 25 slides prepared slides are the smallest sets. A prepared slide is a slide with a specimen already on it embedded in a transparent glue and covered with a permanent cover slip. Stains and microtomes are usually appropriate for some of the more advanced areas of microscopy.

Also, samples of pond water. Include some of the soil just under the water at the pond edge. Different kinds of wee animalcules will appear over the following few days. Stuff some dry weedy grass into the water in the specimen container and more stuff will grow as the grass decomposes. Slides with depressions are good for larger or thicker specimens but regular flat slides and a cover slip will do for most stuff.

Don't buy used prepared slides on E-bay. Most are old, antiques, cracked and the samples have gone to mold. Only buy new prepared slides and look for full sized ones, not the little dinky ones made by skinny fingered watch makers.

Get some polarizing plastic sheets and vitamine C or paracetamol etc.

How can I prepare a vitamin C tablet to view? Can I just melt it in a cup of water and draw off some of the liquid for a slide and let it dry?

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