Light microscopy and adaptive optics, my uncensored and biased opinions

In everyday life and in the lab, there is often a mundane but important problem: cleaning optics . It can be your glasses, microscope objectives, AR-coated lenses, or microscopy coverlips. There are many comprehensive online resources on the topic, such as Newport  tutorial  and Photonics review . In practice, I found that achieving clean surface of glasses, lenses, and coverslips is really hard when using recommended organic solvents. I tried chemically pure 99.98% ethanol, isopropanol, acetone, with and without sonication, gentle wiping with special lens tissue pads  from Thorlabs and generic lens tissue. Almost always there is some residual dirt, smudges or dust. Out of desperation, I tried ordinary soap from lab dispenser - applied, gently wiped, rinsed with distilled water, dried with optical tissue. THIS THING DOES MAGIC. The cheapest and most effective way of cleaning optics ever. This became my only way of cleaning glasses, lenses with AR coati...