A few posts ago I mentioned the new Zeiss scope my advisor aquired. Today I got to play with this sexy, $120,000 scope. And it was awesome.

I felt very at home working with this machine today, especially compared to my first lab day. Old computer-science habits die hard and I picked up the software pretty quickly. The software package that comes with the beautiful machine is pretty shoddy, especially considering the price tag. It is unintuitive, frustrating and a bit buggy, occasionally crashing. The auto save function only works sometimes, meaning you could lose some interesting images if you aren’t careful. Despite that, it works well and gets the job done. Its like any other professional program (like a CAD package or a programming IDE), once you learn all the widgets and doodads imaging is pretty easy.

While the software may be less than optimal, the machine itself is glorious. Completely motorized stage (which is very nice for fine tuning), multiple objectives, including an awesome 60x oil objective, multiple fluorescent bulbs and regular transmitted light. Everything is automated and can be controlled via a touchpad on the machine itself or through the software on the computer. There is live capture, video, multi-fluorescent overlays, you name it. I think there is even a microwave and coffee maker attached to the back.

My favorite feature to play with was the Z-Stack. With this baby you define the top and bottom of the specimen being imaged. The software then automatically captures slices of the specimen at specific intervals from top to bottom, which is then reconstructed into a three-dimensional image. This is also, mind you, used in conjunction with fluorescence. At the end of the imaging, you have a fully 3D model of the cells showing the antibodies you fluoresced. Very, very cool.

It was a very fun day and I’m looking forward to using the scope a lot more this year. Now if only I could buy one for myself…