Fig. 5.

Left panel: image of a rat-tail tendon mounted between a microscope slide and 0.17 mm thick cover slip. The scale bar corresponds to 100 µm. The steep edges of the tendon and individual collagen fiber strands in the image illustrate the diffraction limited <1 µm resolution of our imaging system. A single 500x500 pixel frame was acquired in 2.5 s, and to improve the image quality (the 5 times higher signal-to-noise ratio allows resolving individual collagen strands even in regions with low signal with good fidelity) 25 frames are averaged. Center panel: cross-section through the image at the location indicated by the yellow dotted line in the left panel. Right panel: zoomed in portion of the center panel.