Stereomicroscopes
This past Tuesday’s New York Times has an essay on the educational benefits of stereomicroscopes. These instruments are typically used for dissection, and don’t require advanced preparation of slides. You can stick a bug in a petri dish into the viewing area, and see it magnified: for kids, this should open up new vistas, where the invisible becomes visible, yet it is not alienated from what can be seen with the naked eye. The problem with the standard toy compound microscope is that it magnifies too much, so any relationship between what’s in the viewfinder and what it was in the macro world becomes too abstract for anyone without scientific training. The stereomicroscope doesn’t have this problem because of the lower magnifying power. Plus, you don’t have to spend time preparing slides, where the process of obtaining thin slices of the subject and then coloring it with dye may be too much for a casual afternoon.
A long time ago, my parents got us one of those compound microscopes. It didn’t get that much use, I think, basically for the reasons outlined in the article: you can only do so much with proper slide preparation. And then you run out of dye, and can’t do any more. The little telescope we had got a little more use, and we did see the rings of Saturn one night.
The Times article also brings to mind all the photos of bugs that people post in the DPReview D70 forums that they took with their new macro lenses. There’s a lot of these photos, from different people: everyone has the gee-whiz feeling when taking these pictures for the first time, and sharing it with the Web. The impulse to make the tiny into something reasonably big, whether its through toy stereomicroscopes or expensive camera glass, is the same. I may have to pick up a macro lens at some point or at least a diopter filter at some point and give it a try.