One correspondent wrote privately to suggest I investigate acquiring (or making) a webcam microscope. From what I'm finding on the web, this is a fairly effective and extremely inexpensive way to get a good look at small things A webcam sounds like a great starting point. It has a miniscule numerical aperture but you only need 0.02 - 0.05 for what you're doing. Carl Zeiss still makes the best stereo-zooms and Bausch and Lomb, Cambridge Instruments, Reichert, Wild, and all those others are extinct or bought up by Leitz. In my experience, the old stereo-zooms are truly dinosaurs. Twenty years ago used ones were worth their weight in gold because everybody could use them, not just the microscopists. If you can find one for free, get it but be careful of spending money for one since you won't know what parts are missing until later. Things have changed. We used to pay $500+ for a halogen fiber-optic illuminator and now you can get a cool LED light for pennies. The old Bausch and Lomb Research II had a light path that traversed sixty lens surfaces and you wondered why the image had haze. Tim