Re: What cells can or can't be seen with a light microscope?

Hello, 

A good light microscope will give you a resolution of less than 1um, that 
is 1 micron, 1/1000 millimeter. All nucleated cells, animal or vegetal, 
are much bigger that that. Big bacterias have such a size.
From the list of organelles you give, you can observe easily the cell 
membrane, the cell wall from vegetal cells, the cytoplasm, the nucleus, 
vacuoles... flagelles, chloroplasts and mitochondrias are difficult to 
see, and what is not possible to see with a light microscope is the 
Golgi, the lysosomes, the endoplasmic reticulum, and certainly not an 
individual ribosome (size of a virus).
To get an idea, try to find an electron microscope image on the web, 
there are many... there you can see the relative sizes of the objects

Hope that helps...

At your Mad service

Seb