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Dear Peng Xi:

Not quite sure what you need.  Do you need the relationship between the 
size of the Airy disk in the image plane, and that in the pinhole plane? 
   If so, that relationship has been described as:

d/(2*Msystem*Mobjective)

Where 	d= the physical diameter of the disk in the pinhole plane
	Msystem= the magnification of the confocal system = 53 for a BioRad 
1024 with no additions to the image light path.  That is, if there's 
nothing like a DIC unit or fluorescence illuminator in the light path 
(--if so, some of these add 1.25x to the system mag.  It should say on 
the side of the unit.)
	Mobjective= the magnification of the objective.

This formula comes by way of Hans van der Voort at Scientific Volume 
Imaging in the Netherlands--http://www.svi.nl .  Good folks.  (No 
commercial interest.)

Good luck!

Martin Wessendorf

Peng Xi wrote:
> Search the CONFOCAL archive at
> http://listserv.acsu.buffalo.edu/cgi-bin/wa?S1=confocal
> 
> Hi,
>    I am now working on an imaging project and I need to know the 
> relationship between the Airy disk for a certain objective and the 
> corresponding iris (pinhole) size for Bio-rad MRC1024. So far what I 
> find is " The resulting Airy disk is approximately 2 mm in diameter " 
> but this description is too rough to me. Could you please tell me what 
> is the equation or where can I find this information?
>   Thank you so much!
> 

-- 
Martin Wessendorf, Ph.D.                   office: (612) 626-0145
Assoc Prof, Dept Neuroscience                 lab: (612) 624-2991
University of Minnesota             Preferred FAX: (612) 624-8118
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