Aura Phase Contrast Illuminator

Name: Aura Phase Contrast Illuminator
Brand: Cairn Research

Cairn Research

Price not listed

The Cairn Aura phase contrast illuminator allows true Zernike phase contrast with a working distance up to 180 mm (clear working space!) for your most demanding experiments. Based on a concept developed by Webb et al. at the University of Nottingham, the Aura uses concentric rings of super-bright LEDs in place of the conventional condenser and phase rings. The Aura provides the highest-quality phase contrast images with very simple alignment and works with a selection of inverted research microscopes for electrophysiology, live cell imaging, and multimodal time-lapse experiments. The Aura allo

Cairn Research's own words, read from their page.

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The part other shops don't tell you. Three separate questions, kept separate on purpose, each with its source.

UK company
Registered at Companies House as CAIRN RESEARCH LIMITED, number 01881330. Checked 2026-08-29.
Means the business is a British legal entity, not a British-sounding name owned elsewhere. It says nothing about where anything is made.
UK operations
Not yet checked.
Means people employed here, or premises they actually work from. We keep this separate from the company badge because a registered office can be an accountant's spare room, and a company can be registered in Britain while everything it does happens somewhere else. Where we have not looked, we say so rather than assuming.
British-owned
No majority shareholding traced outside the UK. Companies House.
Read from the register of people with significant control, following the chain of holding companies. It does not gate anything: a firm can be made here and owned elsewhere, and that is worth telling you rather than hiding.
Where it is made
The maker doesn't say, so neither do we.
This is about the individual product, not the company. A British firm can sell things made abroad, which is normal and not a criticism. We would rather tell you which is which than average them into a score.

Aura Phase Contrast Illuminator

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