On Mon, 17 Oct 1994 20:09:26 EDT, Milton Charlton wrote:
 
>Does anyone have experience with the Biorad 1000 UV on an upright
>microscope?  It appears in their pictures that the box which joins
>the visible and UV beams might be a little unweildy mounted on an
>upright scope.
>How useful will the UV excitation be with water immersion lenses?
>
>Milton Charlton
 
As I understand it, BioRad only supply the 1000 UV system on an inverted
microscope (either a Nikon or Zeiss scope). This appears to be a result of
the necessity to bolt all components, including the lasers and the "box" to
an optical bench for alignment purposes.
 
UV excitation with water immersion lenses should not be a problem, provided
those lenses transmit well enough at the UV wavelengths (351nm and 364nm)
and are corrected appropriately for chromatic and spherical abberations at
those wavelengths. Unfortunately, there are not too many of these lenses
available. Zeiss apparently have a new x40 water immersion lens which is
okay in the UV, but I have not seen it yet. Nikon have a WI lens for UV
work, but it is only available on their confocal system, apparently because
of other corrections done within their confocal microscope, and is
therefore not compatible with the BioRad confocal system. Maybe Leica also
have some new lenses, but these would not work on a BioRad system. If
anyone knows of other lenses for water immersion and UV work, I also would
be most interested to hear about them.
 
I hope this helps.
Paul Rigby