Revelation! It IS possible to make an interesting, affordable set of prepared slides for the beginner microscopist. I have seen countless boring, over-priced prepared slide sets in my life but now I can rest easy, I have found a set from Celestron that truly exceeded my expectations.

These slides are less expensive than others I have encountered. I expected to encounter some cost cutting measures to make up for this but nothing immediately jumped out at me. These slides are optically sound, well produced, and effectively packaged in a sturdy wooden box.

The biggest selling feature of Celestron’s prepared slide collection is the cross-section of samples. There are, predictably, plant root, stem, and leaf sections. Protists (single celled organisms) are similarly well represented. The slides that catch my interest are the ones that people always seem to ask for the most: physiology slides. There are six in this collection: cardiac muscle, skeletal muscle, motor neuron, spinal cord, intestine, and a good old-fashioned blood smear.

Well, here we are! The website is live, we’ve got a deal with merchant services for credit card and Interact services, and we are adding product to the e-store just as fast as we can. As some of you may have seen, both our Facebook page and Twitter account are live, so we’re starting to post fun, interesting, and thought-provoking stuff.

Last night, we checked out some of the stock that just came in. Bruce cooed over a cute little baby Dobsonian telescope – a children’s My First Telescope type. Mostly because it is just so teeny next to his personal telescope (an 8″er from Celestron), but also because it was ready to go right out of the box. Brynne was ecstatic over the Celestron Deluxe Handheld Digital Microscope. It was very simple and intuitive to use and plugged right into her laptop. She slid some snake skin under the scope and came up with some excellent pictures. Stay tuned to hear more about this microscope – Brynne plans to post a review of it.

Unfortunately we don’t have either the telescope or microscope loaded into the store yet, but we expect to soon.