I'd like to refer my PI to a slide micrometer we could buy so we can put scale bars on our images of zebrafish. Is NIST certification on a micrometer standard or would getting one without NIST certification be fine? The reason I ask is that the certification jumps the price up hundreds of dollars.
Unless you are performing measurements with very high precision,like measurements in clinical trials preparatory to FDA approval, any good optical company slide micrometer is fine.
Should you require national lab certified, traceable calibration standards certified by The Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt (PTB) is the national metrology institute of the Federal Republic of Germany may be less expensive, and their work is just as good as NIST. (My company uses PBT to test/certify our traceable scanning probe microscope calibration specimens because they are so much faster than NIST)
Hi Sam
if you are taking the images with a CCD/sCMOS camera and you know the magnification of your lens (and any additional magnification e.g. in the tube lens or the camera port of the microscope, this info should be accessible) then you can calculate your scale bar using ImagePixelSize = CameraPixelSize*Binning/ObjectiveMagnification/MagnificationOfAdditionalLens
usually the Binning is 1 in transmitted light images, you should get the camera pixel size form the spec sheet of the camera.
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