i had great fun today playing with the new confocal microscope from Leica (SP8).  Just a demo but very impressive piece of equipment.  Really fast scans and excellent image quality.  The software looks great too.  This would be an ideal system to teach confocal imaging on – simple and intuitive but extremely powerful. The system did a great job of scanning an old sample of artery I had on a slide.  I’ll post images soon.  In the meantime, here’s some shots of the system looking at a kidney glomerulus and an arterial adventitia.  Great for imaging the cardiovascular system.