MicrobeHunter.com Microscopy Forum

Agreed! #2 and #3 especially beautiful.

Thank you, all! Here is the Youtube three part short course on diatoms collecting and cleaning that got me started, and which more or less remains the only instruction I have been able to follow since I have exactly zero training in chemistry, and little, if any, natural intuition for it. I dream of...

Charlie G: wonder what your 'type of phase' question means? Are you asking if it's dark or bright phase (aka negative or positive) perhaps? Rod, congratz on the new scope -- man, that was fast delivery! Condition looks fabulous, and your photography is better than mine which I do not like so much. :...

One of my primary passions is Diatoms! I collected this bunch from the Blanco River near Blanco, Texas, in October 2014. Photos were shot through my AO 10 travel scope using 100x objective with bright phase contrast, Canon T3i shooting directly into the trinoc tube with no relay lens. The frustules ...

I love 'wandering around' my slides and exploring them, I always find new things... Magnificent! And I know exactly what you're talking about; I have some diatom strew slides that I can revisit a year or two later and still find new things on, and it's all the more satisfying being slides I prepare...

I have a fondness for Arachnids. ... We never kill spiders in our house. I liked seeing that, as I have quite an Arachnid affinity too. I saw this little guy running around on my desk and just had to grab the camera because I know jumping spiders are especially photogenic. It is posed on an envelop...

Dammit, if you don't knock it off you're gonna make me want one!

I had always heard about water bears and how easy they are to find by collecting moss, etc., etc., etc., but wasn't having much luck. Finally one day coming out of the local rock & mineral shop and happened to notice some green fuzzy moss growing in an asphalt blob by a parking curb. Being in the ri...

Very cool image. Diatom magnet? I want some of that stuff!

Say, how are your Hydra coming along?

The camera is the AmScope MU300 USB camera, and since I don't have a trinoc on this scope, I am using the .5x reduction lens that fits in place of an eyepiece. Not quite following? The MU300 takes the place of the eyepiece. I thought perhaps you might be referring to the lens in the MU300 barrel, b...

Wow, that's even better! Except you made him look like a scorpion. Kidding! The pose you get is pure luck of the draw, I know, I know...

Seriously, I love it, just beautiful!

This is the kind of post I live for. I wouldn't have known a stomata if it crept up and bit me on the ankle this morning, and now I about halfway understand, and shall soon fill in more blank spaces. Lovely images and lively conversation made it happen. You people are great.

See there, nothing to it.

Holy cow, that's a wonderfully done image!! I'd say your version of oblique illumination strongly suggests DIC, and that's the highest complement that can be given to oblique illumination in my book. Can you tell in greater detail how you managed it? My attempts with oblique in the AO120 and other s...

75RR wrote:Started yesterday, had a few ups and downs.

Beautiful! What were the "ups and downs" about?

Gotta excuse the abysmal quality, I'm brand spanking new to video. For these I have used my Amscope MU300 eyepiece camera in one eyepiece tube of the Swift Stereo Ninety horizontal stereo head. While I practicing how to use the thing, I happened to catch my Hydra in the act of procuring supper: an O...

Well, it begins to look like Hydra is sexually reproducing, as opposed to reproducing by budding, after all. When I checked my patients today there was much reduced granulation in one of the "sacs", and upon closer examination the remaining granules were dancing about! Might need to go to full scree...

Dale, many apologies for being so inattentive! :oops:. Dang, me too. No, I do not use the 2x lens much. My Olympus BX45 has 2x and 1.25x objectives, and as with the 2x on the Nikon, I have played with 'em a bit just to see, but for low power viewing I use one of my stereo scopes. I'm do not know wh...

So what book is that in the first images of this thread? Incidentally, those aren't "clamps", but guides. It takes a bit of doing to properly position a microscope over the field lens on the Ortho-Illuminator. Once you get it just right, you may then adjust the "hands" to touch the horseshoe base, a...

Hey Chris, long time no see! Drop a line sometime. No, these pics are taken with a Canon T3i, Canon 100mm macro lens, stack of extension tubes, on a focus rail on a tripod, using a vintage Spencer 370 research lamp, and a modern eBay LED ring light for stereo scopes, for illumination. Shhh, don't te...

Rod on the loose with that thing! I feel vaguely terrified and fearful, even way down here in Texas!! :shock: Seriously, I very much look forward to seeing what Rod comes up with now that he has this baby in his arsenal. I've seen some pretty darn nice images come out of this guy, folks, using just ...

And how about this one? Looks like the bud has taken over the job of acting as parent, and the parent has assumed the position of bud. I begin to wonder if someone opened a leaky nuclear plant next door and didn't tell me?

Update 24 hours later: I'm wondering if the white mushroom-shaped growths aren't eggs or some such? They appear to be going in that direction...

So what did you end up choosing? Zeiss 160TL, newer style DIC, black WL stand but with 100W lamphouse, rotating biological stage, trinoc head with phototube set up for Canon EOS, should be ready mid January. I will probably post a thread about it as soon as it's far enough along to get some picture...

If you are referring to stereo pairs for cross-eyed viewing like these http://krebsmicro.com/3Dstacks/index.html you could always just try it. That's what I did, with mixed results: some pairs worked delightfully well while others just plain flopped. Recently I saw some very cool stereo pairs made b...

Yeah, think ol' Fan hit the nail on the head alright. The Ortho-Illuminator was an improvement over using a separate 100W research lamp like the AO/Spencer No. 370 or No. 735. Setting up Kohler illumination with these lamps takes learning and practice, and some people have an easier time of it than ...

My workhorse microscopes are outfitted with phase contrast and POL (AO 10 with bright phase contrast and AO 120 with dark phase contrast). Very often when studying some small subject, I swap between bright field, dark field using a phase annulus, oblique using a paritally dialed in phase annulus, PO...

Sad. I hope the healthy ones don't get it... Oh I think there are plenty of cladocera, ostrocods, copepodae, and even a few aquatic insects that might beg to differ. :P Seriously, I'm secretly delighted that something interesting has turned up to refresh my interest. It's certainly something differ...

...why on earth was that huge monster: "Orthoilluminator" developed? Because it looks cooler than a Biozet compact lamp of course. What home laboratory doesn't look nicer with a cherry AO/Spencer Series 2 Trinocular PhaseStar on an Ortho Illuminator just like that first image in this thread? 8-) ht...

And finally, ran across yet another that appears quite normal, and has evidently captured and eaten a bug. Man, that looks like a sorry way to go.