Question: How many times zoom does the microscope go to ?

Kate Dobson answered on 10 Nov 2014:

Good question.
First I am going to “swap” the terms we use to make it easier. The word magnification means we need to know how big the sample was to start with. If, instead we work with the term maximum image resolution we can talk about things a bit easier. Lets imaging the picture we take on a microscope is 1000 pixels by 1000 pixels. With most modern microscopes we can now routinely zoom in until each pixel is <1 micron in size. This image has a 1 micron resolution. A strand of human hair would be about 20-100 pixels across. I look at most of my rock samples with 3-5 micron resolution (in 3D).

On a modern electron microscopes we can get down to resolutions of less 0.5 nanometers which means we can "see" individual atoms. The same strand of hair would then be 20,000-50,000 pixels across! Of course you have to remember, that to work at these high resolutions you can only look at a very small sample!