Lint

That's right, lint--from the clothes dryer!  I guess you could say that lint from the clothes dryer is the cleanest dirt you can find....  Even though it looks like a gray mass, under a microscope it actually is an amazing collection of multicolored fibers and hair.

Click on the image to take a closer look.  In 3D it doesn't have enough resolution to really see it.

Chirp no more.....

I like crickets, but not when they make too much noise.  This guy (gal?) will no longer bother me in the basement.

If you click on the image you should see it full-screen.  If you look closely you can see that he has two protuberances toward the rear of his body (shown below).  I hesitate to ask what they are used for....

Th "mini" weeds of spring (up close)

It isn't March yet, but some of my favorite weeds are already starting to blossom.  I love looking at the very mall flowers of the early ground flowers (weeds?).  This guy (bittercress) seems to grow everywhere and is very prolific.  You can see the flowers and the maturing seed pods on the central stem.  Although they start out very small, they can grow to be 4 - 6 inches wide for the whole plant.

The clay dish is 3 inches in diameter.  The flower stem is shown below in side-by-side stereo

and as an anaglyph.

It isn't always what it seems....

I have spent a fair amount of time recently working on my equipment, and I decided that a piece of "rough" limestone was an excellent sample to look at.  Since the BPC had a "share" for "what is it" photos I took the following (shown as a 3D anaglyph).  The width in the top photo is about 1/2 inch.

My dear wife took one look and suggested this as a better "what is it"--I have to agree that she has a good eye!

The limestone is on the right, mixed breakfast cereal on the left.

Messing with nature

This is a post I actually wrote last winter, but never got around to publishing.  I am still working on getting some quality snowflake photographs using my latest setup.  It is amazing how ugly most snows are, and this winter there has been almost no snows worth looking at!  Since I didn't have any new snowflake images, I dug out some of my older ones and fired up my Photoshop.  I created the following two snowflakes which were a definite improvement over the original:

Just because nature wants snowflakes to have hexagonal symmetry doesn't mean I have to agree.  And if I can have a five spoked snowflake, why not a seven legged starfish!

For details on how (not why!) this was done in Photoshop, check out my "Just Stuff" link.

A new crop of garage bugs.

I noticed some little white spots on the mints in the garage and looked at them under the microscope.  Since I was able to find an Aphid on the underside of several leaves, I am assuming that the guy below is just a very immature form.  I base this mainly on the similarity with the long antennas that the larger bug shown on the left has.  I guess the snow outside has all the bugs trying to find a home in my garage.  I will have to look for more creatures today.

The aphid on the top is perhaps 1/2 mm long while the transparent looking guy below is about half that.  I wonder how many of these we eat every day?

George Washington

There is no reason for doing this other than just showing that I can waste enormous amounts of time and electrons for no reason.  This "photo" of George Washington was obtained by combining 196 images taken with the Nikon FS2 bioscope.  It probably should have taken only about half that number, but only the central part was in focus so I took more than needed and cropped the edges.

I uploaded the image to gigapan and discovered that everyone likes to take "panorama" pictures of money (there are quite a few gigapans of dollar bills)--oh well.  You can see mine here or you can just look at it below.

Caution! Explicit sexual images.....

I noticed some of the flowers were blooming in the garage so I grabbed one.  After taking this picture I removed the petals to get a better view of the stamens and pistel. 

Click on the image to enlarge it. Don't you love those "hairs"?  The colors are actually not far off.  The orange background is from the back-lighting on the microscope.  The bottom image was a combination of 24 photos combined to increase the depth of field.

Really big photos of little things

One web site I like is the GigaPan site. It has some fantastic images for those who like to see the "big picture" I just finished photographing the "forever stamp" currently in use by the USPS.  This thumbnail (1000 x 1150 pixels) is reduced from the full image size  of 11,935 x 13,720 pixels!  The full image was generated using the Photo shop photo merge routines using 60 images taken with my Nikon FS-2 bioscope and my D80.  To really appreciate the resolution, look at the following!
You can learn all about the GigaPan project and see some other fantastic images at their site:  http://www.gigapan.org.   Click here to see this picture using the GigaPan system (you can see it in full screen mode).  There is also a GigaPan view of a Lincoln commemorative stamp--just search for "postage stamp"

A Sticky Situation

 

I was actually going to look at some "Velcro" since I had been looking at the "thorns" on various plant leaves.  Velcro was modeled after the naturally occurring hooks on the cocklebur seed. In the same drawer I had some 3M Dual Lock fasteners and decided to take a look at them.  Talk about weird!  The Dual Lock fasteners can be repeatedly fastened and unfastened and have some amazing holding power.  In any case I decided it would be fun to see if I could get a good picture of one.  The one close up shows the toadstool shape of the little appendages, and the second image is a stereo pair of the surface.  Helicon focus was used in both cases to get a decent depth of field (each picture required 20+ stacked images).

 

Lady bug feet......

I'm getting a bit better with my depth of field stuff.  Here is a rather neat (I think) stereo image of the "foot" of a Japanese Lady Bug. The lady  bug is shown in stereo above (about 15x)  and the "foot" (at about 400x) is shown below.  You have to "uncross" you eyes to see it in 3D.

The closeup image is a blended depth of field with over 69 total images.  The foot is that little thing hanging down in the upper photo (not the pin he is glued to).  I also have it as an anaglyph 3D image in Flickr if you have red/green glasses.

This guy is really ugly!

It does make me want to get rid of all the flowers that we have sitting around the house in stagnant water. I wonder if there are just as many evil characters in dirt--just harder to see. I think this guy is called a "water bear".

A close look at Coleus.

Coleus is one of the garden flowers I try to keep over winter in the garage since they are easy to start in the spring and are low maintenance.  While my winter crop doesn't look too good, I decided it was worth a quick peek under the microscope.  The following images show some of the details that are present.  I find it interesting that the coleus leaves also have little "horns".  It also seems that individual cells are colored completely--either all red or all green in the leaf I was looking at.

Bird's Nest fungus.

It is easy enough to see why these things are named "bird's-nest fungus".  One of my flower beds was filled with them last year and I brought this one in to see how well it would photograph.  The diameter of the fungi is about 1/4 inch and they typically like to grow on woody compost (at least in my garden).  If you are really bored, you can read about the exciting sex life of this species on Wayne's Word!

A New Favorite Microscope!

I finished up a camera mount to hold my D80 on the Nikon Alphaphot-2 and it works surprisingly well.  It took a bit of sawing, drilling, tapping, and silver soldering and as you can see the results were well worth the effort.  The poor spider shown in today's blog made the mistake of running across the counter when I was making coffee this morning.  I took the "whole spider" photo with my Nikon FS-3V slit lamp bioscope and the closeup is with my "new" system (don't you love the eight eyes)--zoom in on the microscope picture and you can see the spider on the stage.  I am going to have fun with this one!  I still have to take time to really clean everything up (you can still see soot and grime in the cracks), but the images so far look as good as one can expect for something that was declared unrepairable junk.  I wish now that I had done this last summer when it would have been easier to collect some pond creatures--this makes me anxious for spring to come!
The closeup was generated from 28 photos in Helicon Focus after prealignment and cropping in Photo Shop.

Itsy Bitsy Things.

Now we are talking really small!  I took this image with with my Nikon Alphaphot-2 just to see if I could.  This particular microscope had been in a lab that had experienced a fire with significant smoke damage. As a result it was covered with soot when I got it (thus I got it cheap).  I have it pretty well cleaned up, but it probably needs a lot more work.  In any case this is a strange little object (creature?) that was left over after a drop of water from the flower vase evaporated.  The image is about 400x.  I tried to calibrate it with a micrometer slide and I would guess the creature (or whatever) is about 12 microns across.  I am definitely going to have to make a good camera mount so that I can take pictures of some really small creatures!  I did, by the way, use Helicon focus (six images) to get the depth of field decent.  I also am going to have to start reading to find out what I am looking at!  The next thing I have to do is construct a better mount for the microscope to hold my D80.