The following rules on how to operate the laser scanning microscopes of the facility must be read and acknowledged by signing an appropriate confirmation sheet, available in the facilty. These rules are in place to avoid damage to equipment, to guarantee the optimal use of the facility and to make it a safe working environment:

- Please log your imaging session using the provided log sheets.

- All users are responsible for the Health and Safety requirments of their experiments. The risk assessments for the CALM facility only cover the equipment and its operation, but not experiments taken into the facility by users. Thus, you have to provide valid risk assessments and/or COSHH forms where this is applicable. However, if you plan to bring hazards into the facility, please inform the Head of the Facility beforehand, in particular if you are not sure about the safety situation. Please bear in mind that this is a multi-user facility and that a breech of Health and Safety regulations could put other people at risk.

- Do not change or remove any objective lenses unless you have been appropriately trained and particularly authorised to carry out this operation. If you remove an objective from the headpiece carousel, replace it by an appropriate stopper cap.

- Do not contaminate any water- or air-corrected lens with immersion oil. If you do so by accident, please remove the oil with 70% EtOH immediately and inform the Facility Manager. As a general rule, use either oil- or water-corrected lenses depending on your experimental needs.

- Do not move the headpiece carousel manually, this could lead to scratching the front lens of the objective.

- Clean up any spill immediately, in case any liquid has soaked into parts of the stage, bore holes of air tables, etc, contact the Facility Manager.

- When you finish your imaging session, co-ordinate with the next user and leave lasers and lamps switched on for the next session where appropriate. This avoids a waste of time caused by unnecessary cool-down times. The cool-down time for lasers and mercury light sources is 30 min before they can be switched on again. This measure also helps to elongate the life time of the light sources.

- Copy and remove all your data from the acquisition PCs as soon as possible, since these computers are purely for image acquisition and not for data storage. In not saving your data, you might risk to loose them in frequent ‘wipes’ of the appropriate hard drives.

- Please report all equipment faults and possible damages to the Facility Manager or the Head of the Facility.