Given my ongoing research interest in UV microscopy, I am always looking out for information on the subject. A few days ago I found a brochure published by Bausch and Lomb which talked about objectives and other items they had made which were designed for use at 365nm. As I hadn’t heard about these before, and I haven’t found any more about these, I thought I would share it here.

The document was called “Ultra Violet Photomicrography at 3650Å Optics and Other Accessories”. Here’s the cover page.

3650Å is 3650 Angstroms and is the same at 365nm. These are glass objectives and are corrected so the focus point at 365nm is the same as that at 546nm, so that they can be focused in visible light and then used for imaging at 365nm. This was done to improve resolution, as a ‘half way house’ imaging in the UV with glass optics but not going to the extremes of using quartz optics and imaging down below 300nm.

They give an example of the comparison between a 546nm image and a 356nm one of a Amphipleura pellucida diatom, which shows the improvement nicely.

Here’s the information about the objectives.

Thing is, I had not heard of these before, nor have I ever seen any examples of them. If anyone has any, I’d love to see what they look like, and please feel to contact me here.