Depth of Field Demonstration: On a Simulated Microscope

At higher magnifications, microscope lenses will only be able to focus on layers within your specimen. You could take a series of images with different focal planes and stack them together, but without a camera mounted on the microscope, getting images to line up right for focus stacking is quite the challenge. The alternative is focusing in and out until you get a feeling for the three dimensional shape of the specimen.

Since I don’t have a camera mount I’ve created an html5/javascript page that simulates focusing in and out of a sample. It’s embedded above, but a direct link is here.

You can use the knobs to the right of the image to adjust the focal plane. You should be able to see hairs on the top and bottom of the transparent wing.

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