An Automated System for Maintaining Liquid Nitrogen Levels in the Gatan Cryostage.
For several years we have been developing a system for the automated control and acquisition of images from a transmission electron microscope [1,2,3]. The system has been developed around a Philips CM200 equipped with a Gatan cryostage and a Gatan MSC CCD camera. One of the primary motivations in developing this software is to provide for a system that can acquire many hundreds of images over several days of completely unattended operation.The current implementation of our automated system allows data to be automatically collected from the TEM for more than 36 hours. There is no intervention required from the operator except for one critical exception, refilling the Gatan cryostage. The cryostage, which maintains the temperature of the vitreous ice specimens, must be refilled with liquid nitrogen (LN2) approximately every two hours.