In this video, we're going to begin our introduction to light microscopy. Recall that light microscopy, as its name implies, uses visible light and lenses to magnify small objects up to about 1000x magnification. This essentially means that light microscopes have the ability to increase the apparent size of the image up to about 1000 times larger than the actual object, allowing us to visualize really small objects. Now, as we'll learn moving forward in our course, there are actually several different types of light microscopes. Each type of light microscope has its own set of advantages and disadvantages.
Notice in the image below, we show you the outline of the light microscopy lesson that we have planned. At the very top, we have light microscopy, and branching off below are different types of light microscopy. Moving forward in our course, we will discuss some of these types in their own individual videos. Since this is an outline or a map of our lesson, you can actually use it as such. We will be following this map by addressing the leftmost branches first. We will first talk about bright field microscopes, and then we will move on to light microscopes that increase contrast, which includes dark field microscopes, phase contrast microscopes, and differential interference contrast (DIC) microscopes.
After we finish discussing light microscopes that increase contrast, we will move on to light microscopes that detect fluorescence. This group includes confocal scanning laser microscopes (CSL microscopes), 2-photon microscopes, and super-resolution microscopes. This method is just a way to organize our lesson. Moving forward, we will be discussing each of these types in the particular order that I mentioned.
Notice here, in the green box in the background, we organize two microscopes that are important for imaging cells in three-dimensional space. These are going to be DIC and CSL microscopes. We will talk more about this as we move forward.
This concludes our brief introduction to light microscopy. Moving forward, we are going to talk about the bright field microscopes first before we move on to the others. I'll see you all in our next video.