A microscope using three water immersion objective lenses which realizes confocal, 4Pi‐confocal and various confocal theta microscopies in fluorescence, transmission, scattered, and reflection mode is described. An argon‐ion laser is the primary light source. A pulsed titanium‐sapphire laser allows two‐photon absorption fluorescence microscopy. The instrument has a predicted resolution of 100 nm along the illumination axis and a three‐dimensional resolution of 5×106nm3for lenses each with a numerical aperture of 0.75. This is an improvement of an order of magnitude over a confocal fluorescence microscope using the same lens. Applications of the microscope range from observation of a sample at three different angles, to confocal theta fluorescence microscopy with multiphoton absorption. Since mounting and immersion media are identical, aberrations become negligible. The large working distance of 2 mm makes the instrument ideal for the observation of biological samples of up to 1.5 mm in diameter such as drosophila embryos.