Camera Microscope Adapter

This worked out surprisingly well…

The project was to mount my pocket camera on the stereo zoom microscope, so I can take decent pix of small stuff.

The entrance pupil of the camera is about the same size as that of a human eyeball: focus at infinity, tune for best picture, and you’re set. Best of all, no microscope mods other than a wrap of tape around the eyepiece to prevent scratching.

My heap disgorged two tubes that were exactly the right diameter and length with finished ends (evidently stubs left over from a previous lathe project), so all I had to do was turn the adapter ring between them. The heap even had a slightly-too-long 1/4-20 thumbscrew with a boss below the thread. Ya gotta have stuff!

I set the ‘scope up with the eyepiece exactly vertical, put the tubes on the eyepiece, screwed the T-bracket to the camera,  squooshed a J-B Weld epoxy putty turd between the T and the tube, then boresighted the camera to the ‘scope axis by centering the light on the LCD. Shazam: nearly perfect alignment with no fussy machining. I added two machine screws through the blob: I don’t trust the camera to an epoxy-PVC joint.

The smallest field looks like 2 mm, so the resolution is about 2 mm/2400 = 800 nm, which I don’t believe for an instant. Maybe a micron or three, at best, limited far more by the camera than the ‘scope. Widest is >15 mm, a more reasonable and still unbelievable 6 microns. The lens just ain’t that good.

The eggs are from our stick insect, with a millimeter scale.

[Update: This post seems to pop up in response to searches for stick insect eggs. One of my rather more interesting pictures is there.]