Silver: Microscope

Our microscope is equipped with an incubator that can be set to be at certain temperature. It has been recently at 37C due to most people working with mammalian and other bugs that like that temperature. I've noticed for a while now that sometimes it is off as well as some oddness in using the scope.

A couple of pointers (all worded in a positive way) regarding how to have the scope nice and running for many years:

• The incubator's thermostat wants to be always ON. It is always ready to do its job 24h a day, 7 days a week. For real.

• The temperature should be changed from 37C only if you want to image your stuff in the scope at a different temperature, such as yeast at 30C. Also, it's only useful to change the temperature if you're doing timelapses. The scope loves constant temperature and changing it back and forth all the time will make its objectives unhappy. Broken unhappy. Costly unhappy. Pam unhappy. Pam angry.

• The temperature the thermostat is set at is different than the actual temperature inside the incubator. You need to look at the thermometer inside the incubator resting on the stage and read the actual temperature.

• If you don't know how to do something with the scope, please ask. There's plenty of people in the lab that will help you and answer your questions.

I've noticed that as people come into the lab, they're not aware of a lot of details. I think it will be useful to write a short 2 page document with some guidelines. Once I have a draft, I'll send it around for comments and then we'll put a printed version in the scope room.