[ High School and Self-Education Board ]
Posted by StaceyL in Canada on 8:41 Nov 20
My gr 10 son and I have started using a borrowed microscope for his biology course. Today we began with threads and cheek cells (labs form Apologia,though we are using a different text for coursework). The microscope has 40X, 100X, and 400X magnifications. we could easily focus for the first two magnifications, but could not resolve an image of anything under the 400X. According to the Apologia Bio instructions, one should first focus at the lowest mag, with the course adjustment, then fine-tune with the fine adjustment. Then when moving up to the next two mags, one should only need to use the fine adjustment knob. However, we just end up with blurred images, no matter what we do (fine or course adjustments). Could someone tell me what we're doing wrong, or why we can't seem to resolve images under the 400X? Thank you.