Hello. For the last couple of years, we at Journey to the Microcosmos have been taking you into a world that is our world, and yet is also another world. Invisible, but beautiful. Easy to ignore, but wildly dramatic. Beneath our notice, but vital. We invite people into that world through our videos, but now we want to invite people to take their own journeys, and to share them.

We, in partnership with our master of microscopes, James, have developed a microscope designed for content creation. Instead of just staring with your eyes, take advantage of the marvelous cameras that we all have on our cell phones, both to view the microcosmos and to record it, so you can share your discoveries with the rest of the world.

One of the most common questions we get is, "What microscope should you buy?" But it turns out that's a complicated question. Filters, objectives, eyepieces, condensers-- and we think you should know about all of that, but it's not as simple as just linking to a microscope that's the best option. After all, the body of a microscope is just a stand. It's the things you tack onto it that make it great. And so, we wanted to build something we think is a great base level microscope, and also provide some options to tack onto it depending on your goals.

The first of these options is a set of oblique illumination and dark field filters. Oblique illumination can add a sense of depth to your image, while dark field microscopy highlights samples on a dark background rather than a light background. And there's also an option for a set of Rheinberg filters. These can makes your images more dramatic by adding color or color gradients.

And then for our highest perk level: in addition to including the achromatic lenses, we will also include a set of plan-objectives. An achromatic lens will have more distortion in the outer 35% of the field of view, while the plan-objectives reduce that distortion to only the outer 5%. Plan-objectives are more expensive because they have twice as many little lenses packed inside doing the work of decreasing operations, but the cheapest microscope we have available uses the same lenses as the one we filmed our first episodes of Journey to the Microcosmos on, so all of these options are wonderful options.

Also, remember, microscopy is about a lot more than just equipment. Great work can be done without going all in, and the parts of microscopy that aren't microscopes -- well, there's a lot of them, and we can help with that as well. Sample collection, taking care of cultures, identification of microbes -- all part of the game, and so we've worked with James to create a short booklet that gives an introduction to all of these things, which is included on its own or with all of our other perk levels.

And of course, we're doing all of this with the hope that you will find things that you will want to share with your friends, with the internet, and with us. Frankly, we can only discover so much alone. So we wanted to give you a head start, and push you in the right direction. We cannot wait to see what you find.