I'm starting to turn blue...

I've been holding my breath for quite some time now, trying to figure out if my scope is "fixed." After a week and a half of rebuilding, and a week checking it out, I think I can finally say that my scope is in working condition. I spent yesterday calibrating it, since images I was obtaining were coming out smeared, more so in one direction than the other. Imagine taffy. Anyway, temperature fluctuations seem to mess with my scope quite a bit more than before, so I have to be very careful how I do things now.

A couple of degrees can throw everything out of wack. How? It's only a couple of degrees! Okay, so picture this - you are trying to take a picture of a group of kids. They have all had a few cokes to drink along with a few bags of candy. Need I say more? You can tell them to "sit still" all you want, but with all that sugar, they have too much ENERGY and are just moving around and pushing each other and doing everything BUT sit still. That's how it works with my samples. I'm trying to take images very up close and a couple of degrees allows them enough ENERGY to make my images blurry.

I think I may have come up with a solution, sort of, and now I'm trying to finish up my final calibration. Hopefully, I'll be doing experiments again next week!

Yay!!!! :)