Progress Report And Thanks For Your Generous Sharing

That image looks pretty good. Just need to crop the aliased portions and it will be very presentable. Your lighting is excellent and gives good shadow presentation and surface feel.

A 10x NA 0.25 has nominal aperture of f1.8. The Extreme Macro calculator http://extreme-macro.co.uk/focus-stacking/ says to use 7um, while the Zerene table http://zerenesystems.com/cms/stacke...acromicrodof says 8.8um. For 10x NA 0.25 I use 6.25um steps.

Glad to hear that Raf came through again. I've always had a good buying experience with him.

I use a custom-built stacking rig, similar function to StackShot but using a Trinamic interface. This forces me to use Helicon, which supports both Trinamic and StackShot. Zerene does not support Trinamic.

With the Z-stage you are using, you can achieve average 5um steps with little difficulty, so you should be good.

Thanks for the link AK. I am familiar with the video series by Michael Erlewine, in fact I watched and downloaded links for the entire series a few months ago (almost 2 dozen half-hour videos). However, his interest is in wider view (panoramic) macro on a tripod, and nowhere in his entire series does he point the camera straight down or mount it on a copystand. Nonetheless, there is enough overlap in the basic principles he discusses that I got inspired to get in the digital macro game in the first place because of him. Things have come a LOOOOOOng way from the days of film.