The ore microscope used for the research activities here is a Leitz Orthoplan Pol from the early 80ies. The Orthoplan was for many years the flagship of the Leitz research microscopes and the dream of many researchers. Today they are available at reasonable prices on the market, and still performing very well. The Pol version for incident light is pretty rare, though. This one is equipped with NPL Pol or NPL Fluotar Pol objectives and with a Jenoptik ProgRes C5 cooled CCD camera for documentation. The old power supply for the halogen lamp was replaced by a highly stabilized one for the routine work.
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Additionally a Leitz xenon short arc lamp was attached to the microscope using a mirror house which allows to switch between halogen and Xenon arc without removing the lamps. The spectral distribution and high light output of the lamp allow the use of 10 nm wide band filters to measure reflectance at wave lenghs between 400 and 800 nm. Since the Bayer mask of color cameras interferes with narrow wavelength filters, for multispectral fotos a ProgRes MFcool was bought. Also available is a SiC secondary standard and Ocean Optics specular reflectance standards by which quantitative reflectance measurements are possible.
The second Orthoplan has a Leitz MPV-SP microphotospectrometer attached which allows the measurement of hole spectra between 200-800 nm. Depending on the software used (Leica Spectra or MPV.meas) also series of points of a fixed wavelength can be logged.
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Both systems together allow basically every measurement of ore samples which is possible with light microscopy, from simple documented polarised light microscope to multispectral fotos and reflectance measurements.