Identifying and fixing in-plane positioning and stability issues on a microscope using nanoGPS OxyO scales

Abstract

Abstract Investigations of the in-plane positioning capabilities of microscopes using commercially available nanoGPS OxyO scales are presented. The scales have patterns that contain absolute position information, and nanoGPS software accurately determines the in-plane position from the scale images captured by the microscope camera. This makes in-plane positioning experiments simple and fast. We investigated different microscopy systems and found that positioning performance is a system issue that is not determined solely by the stage performance. In some cases, our experiments revealed software or hardware glitches that limited the positioning performance, which we easily fixed. We have also shown that it is possible to investigate vibrations using this approach and quantify their impact on image blurring. This is, for example, useful for experimentally determining the settling time after a stage movement.