I am curious to find out if anybody out there has tried an alternative lens for the tube correction lens. Before I start doing experiments on my own, I wanted to see if others have tried anything. Would a 50mm Plano Convex lens work in its place?
I have never tried this before but considering making my own lens with my CNC machine. There are a lot of great videos out there on machining a lens. I imagine that these won’t be anywhere to the caliber of a lens from Thor labs, but I am curious to see how they do. I would love thoughts.
Any lens that focuses the light onto the sensor at the correct focal distance will work. Practically a biconvex lens is generally used in microscopy applications (imaging things that are close) and plano-convex in telescopes (imaging things that are far away). The cemented doublet lens is recommended as it corrects for chromatic aberration (different wavelengths getting refracted at different angles) without being too high in cost.
One other thing is that most lenses used for microscopy applications come with an anti-reflective coating so as to reduce noise from stray light.