A scanning tunneling microscope that uses a micrometer coarse approach mechanism is described. The approach mechanism can be decoupled from the rest of the microscope to result in a thermally compensated instrument. Thirty minutes after establishing tunneling, lateral thermal drift in our instrument is down to 0.5 A˚/min. Construction details of the microscope and high resolution images of pyrolytic graphite and 2H‐NbSe2samples are presented.