Microscope Lab Report Essay

During the microscope lab, my partner and I learned how to properly use a microscope, calculate the field of view, and view and prepare slides. Microscopes are instruments used to view very small objects that cannot be seen with the naked eye. We found that microscopes have many different parts to them, including the diaphragm, ocular lens, and objective lenses. There are three powers of magnification, scanning power (4x), low power (10x), and high power (40x). To find the total magnification, we multiplied the ocular lens (10x) by the power of the objective lens. The diaphragm lets a certain amount of light through to the specimen. The bigger the diaphragm hole the more light, and the smaller the diaphragm hole, the less light. The field of view is the …show more content…
What was interesting to us was the “e” was actually upside down. We then moved the slide left, but the image moved right. This showed us that the image is always reversed. When we went to 400x, we found that we could not even see the “e” anymore, and that we could only see the threads of the paper. Next, we started to view a prepared slide of Amoeba at high power. It was hard to find the Amoeba because it was super tiny, and it took some time to focus in on it. The Amoeba fit two times across the field of view, and the approximate size was 250 micrometers. We then moved onto comparing animal and plant cells. First, we observed cheek cells, and we made a slide by scraping the inside of our check and adding methylene blue. It was amazing to see our own check cells in the microscope, because we could even see the nucleus of the cell. Then, we got a piece of elodea leaf and made another wet mount slide. We could see the cell walls of the plant cells, and the chloroplasts moving because of cytoplasmic streaming. We knew that both were eukaryotic cells because they were both multicellular. Lastly, we looked at a prepared slide of three different colored