Microscope objectives

Magnification

The transverse magnification (\(M_T\)) is the most familiar specification for an objective that is usually provided by the manufacturer. However, this is slightly confusing, since an infinity corrected objective has no image (without an additional lens). It is therefore implicity assumed that the user of an objective will use the manufacturer tube lens, at which point the object is magnified by: \[ M_T = - \frac{y_i}{y_o} \tag{1}\] where the negative sign is by convention and indicates and inverted image (Hecht 2016). Ignoring the sign convention we can rewrite (1) in the form most familiar to microscope users: \[ Image = M_T \; Object \tag{2}\]