Lou, how cool to have your very own volcano! Must admit that if I were in your shoes, I'd probably forget photomicrography for a while and do volcano photography. Looks like a lovely volcano to climb and ski on, and the possibility of getting blown to bits at any moment would add to the sense of adventure.
The classic solution to your vibration problem is straightforward, and would probably work very well. My first awareness of it comes from Lester Lefkowitz' writings.
You get three or four small rubber inner tubes (such as those used for wheelbarrows or go-karts), and place a heavy platform on them (such as a cement paving block used in landscaping, a granite slab leftover from a kitchen counter project, or a heavy steel plate.
The inner tubes should not be fully inflated--they will need to have a little bit of air in them, but should definitely be flabby. Then the earth can shake quite a bit under your microscope, which will float serenely, and largely motionlessly, on the heavy slab.
I've experimented a bit with the technique. Though I don't have a volcano handy, I tried it with a furnace running close-by, a dehumidifier, myself jumping up and down on the floor, and a few other perturbations. If my experience is any guide, adjusting the amount of air in the inner tubes will allow you to "tune" the platform for the frequency of the vibration you want to eliminate.
On the other hand, if you go the route of hanging your platform from the ceiling, I'd suggest using a dynamic rope, rather than a static one. (For those not versed in mountain climber-speak, a dynamic rope is designed to safely arrest a fall, and has some stretch capability, typically 5-10 percent under a static load, much more under a dynamic load. However, it is not bouncy, like a bungy cord.) You want a material that does not efficiently transmit mechanical energy. An ideal material is both an inefficient conductor of mechanical energy, and an absorber of mechanical energy. An underinflated inner tube is both. My gut feel, having spent lots of time on both static and dynamic ropes, is that even a dynamic rope will transmit vibration a bit too efficiently, in the short length from your ceiling to work height (it would be different if you could hang your platform from something much higher). And it wouldn't be easy to tune the system for the frequency of vibration you need.
This last point is important--in my experience, tuning a vibration isolating platform for a particular vibrational frequency is important. And tuning to cancel one frequency of vibration may make the system more sensitive to another frequency.
Please let us know what you do, and how it works!
Cheers,
--Chris
