In turn, there are now a lot of optical drives sitting unused in ... you can have a try at turning one into a laser microscope. This build requires two DVD pickups. By scanning once horizontally ...

The basic scheme here is known as confocal laser scanning fluorescence microscopy, where a laser ... which are good enough to read pits as small as 150 nm on a Blu-Ray DVD, are well-suited for ...

The diffraction limit restricts the spatial resolution of optical microscopes, making it challenging to observe structures smaller than approximately half the wavelength of the illuminating light.