Magnification of optical microscope

Magnification in physical terms is defined as " a measure of the ability of a lens or other optical instruments to magnify, expressed as the ratio of the size of the image to that of the object". This means, that an object of any size is magnified to form an image.

The magnification required to produce the visible image can be calculated using the formula: Magnification = Image ÷ Object. It is important that the all the units are in unison so that the final answer obtained is correct.

An optical microscope (or light microscope) uses visible light and lenses to magnify objects that are not visible to the naked eye. The magnification of a light microscope is formed using a mixture of the powers of the eyepiece and the objective lens. The eyepiece produces a power of 10x and the objective lens can produce various different powers, so if it were to produce a power of 100x, the final magnification would be 1000x. Light microscopes generally have three different objective lenses to allowing viewing the slide in three separate manners.

Empty magnification is the phenomenon that shows us that increasing the magnification past a certain point results in no higher increase in resolution. So although the image will be more magnified, the resolution will not be able to be increased. In fact, an increase in magnification past the optimum point could result in things such as artefacts appearing. These are substances which are not natural to the object and have arisen during the preparation of the slide being viewed.