Lumencor Laser Light Engines

CELESTA Light Engine

The Lumencor® CELESTA and CELESTA quattro Light Engines® incorporate arrays of 4–7 individually addressable solid-state lasers. CELESTA Light Engines marry the high brightness of LASERs with specialty beam shaping to deliver controlled, consistent, homogeneous illumination required for dedicated applications. CELESTA Light Engines are at home on CrestOptics spinning disk systems, spatially resolved transcriptomic platforms, and other advanced imaging applications demanding power, speed, and uniformity.

The CELESTA Light Engine brings together 7 independent, solid-state lasers with advanced electronic control to deliver unprecedented optical power and performance. The CELESTA quattro Light Engine provides the same levels of performance in an economical 4‐ or 5‐laser format.

The newest laser options are 488 nm, 577 nm, and 680 nm, bringing the total number to 10. Each laser output is refined by a bandpass filter and merged into a common optical train, passed through a despeckler, and directed to the light output port on the front of the Light Engine. The light output port has a built‐in adapter for facile connection to microscopes and other bioanalytical instruments through a SMA‐ or FC/PC‐terminated optical fiber. Laser output at the distal end of the optical fiber is ~800 mW from each laser.

CELESTA lasers are allied with sophisticated control and monitoring systems to deliver the performance needed for spinning disk confocal microscopy, spatial transcriptomics and other advanced imaging applications. When a microscopist requires high irradiance across a large field, the CELESTA Light Engine delivers reliable results. CELESTA Light Engines are often the illuminator of choice for CrestOptics V2 and V3 spinning disk confocal. This Lumencor Light Engine yields sufficient photon flux to fill that immense field of view (25 mm) on X‐Light V2 and V3. Moreover, the available power from each CELESTA laser supports the X-Light’s fast disk rotation. Microscopists whose large area, highly multiplexed samples demand fast acquisition choose CELESTA Light Engine as their preferred illumination tool.

The CELESTA’s controls reside on an onboard computer with an embedded command library. These commands give access not only to the basic functions of laser channel selection, on/off switching and output intensity adjustment, but also to an extensive set of operating status reports and adjustable preference settings. A GUI resident on the onboard computer provides convenient access to many of the command library functions using a Web browser via the Light Engine’s Ethernet connection. TTL trigger inputs are provided for all output lines for applications requiring fast (100 microseconds) switching. Real‐time performance tracking and stabilization feedback is included in the sophisticated, turn‐key design.

Lumencor’s complementary ZIVA and ZIVA quattro Light Engines are optimized for applications requiring laser light output coupling via narrow bore (≤200 µm diameter) optical fibers with low numerical apertures.