Another early spring flower

I keep noticing these small blue flowers which appear to be widespread in the neighborhood.  The flowers are only a few mm in diameter, but under the microscope they look lovely!  As nearly as I can tell they are a type of "Creeping Speedwell".  The images below were taken with my Nikon FS-2 using a new micrometer based system to get better resolution with my focus stacking.  Each of the photos was composed of over 30 individual images merged using Helicon Focus.

The photo above is fairly high resolution (click to enlarge), and the images below are side-by-side parallel 3D, followed by anaglyphs.

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.

A very old bug

I did this just to see if I could.  While at the local Rock and Mineral Show last year I foolishly spent $10 on a piece of amber that looked like it had all kinds of bugs inside.  I finally got around to cutting and polishing a piece and, sure enough, there is a 40,000,000 (more or less) year old mosquito (or some such creature!).  This again is a red/green anaglyph.

From the tip of the tail to the end of the head is about 2.5 mm.

Escaping Spiders!

Watch out for spiders crawling out of their picture frames!  (you need red/green glasses for this one)

More herbs from the winter garden

One of my favorite herbs in the garden is rosemary.  Not only is it easy to grow and propogate, it easily overwinters in the house with minimal care.  I learned last spring how many different plants are fun to look at
with my microscope, so I picked a sprig of rosmary for today's picture.  The first thing I noticed was the fact that the wonderful fragrance is most likely the little spheres of liquid that you can see on both sides of the leaf, especially bottom surface. Presumably these spheres contain the eucalyptol (C10H18O; 1,3,3-Trimethyl-2-oxabicyclo(2,2,2)octane) that is one of the two major "essential oils" in rosemary (camphene being the other).  As with many plants there are small "hairs" growing on both the upper and lower parts of the leaf, mainly the bottom.  This accounts for the "whittish" look one notices. After looking at the plant for some time I noticed that there are dozens of microscopic spiders living and crawling around the hairlike fibers.

 So.... the next time you rub some rosemary to enjoy the smell, remember all those little creatures you probably have on your fingers (and up your nose!)