Biochemical R&D Scientist by profession
Located about 100km from Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Widower, lost my lovely wife to a long hard battle with cancer when she was 38 about 1.5yrs ago
I purchased an Omax trinocular compound scope, with 4x, 10x, 40x, and 100x(oil) objectives to help take away the pain. I had memories of the first time ever looking through a microscope and the whole new world to get lost in, the feeling of wowness in school, of being capivated and able to stare for hours if the classes didnt end. Later in life in university, i volunteered time working in a botany lab carving resin away from caplet-sized slugs encasing orchid seeds, working under a stereo disection scope to present a flat surface for subsequent microtome work and EM analysis. A very boring, tedious job to many, I remember a total immersion of peace and tranquility that came from working in the world of the superzoomed...
I determined earlier this year that there were things i wanted to see in the small world made big, to show off, that a standard biological scope couldn't work with - 0603 LEDs, leaf structures - that were too thick, or needed different lighting, and I complimented my scope with a (Brand forgotten) stereo zoom disection scope. Its a trinocular body, but, the camera port only works by sliding a lever to redirect one of the eyepiece paths to it, so is that a true trinocular...?
I have 2, 5 and 8 megapixel USB cameras to fit into the tertiary port, the latter two taking fantastic still images but suck so badly for video - a paramecia swimming in circles shows up as a fuzzy transparent blob in one frame, then on the other side of the screen in the next. I want to get good videos because I love watching biologicals (and adding glycerol or protosol helps slow them down enough to be almost videoable, but tends to do too much 'braindamage' to them sometimes and the nice activity of movement, injesting, etc falls apart. I need to find a way to make a housing for my HD camcorder, which doesn't have any lens-threading to tie into, to do such better realtime videos through an ocular.
Unfortunately, I still find myself held captive in amazement and tranquility while watching a droplet of pond water or simlar, and will stare into that world for hours, often forgetting to add more water, until watching the small universe shrink away from the sides of the scope
So making videos never seems to get done as planned - "Spend a few mins and find something interesting to record.." turns into a trance-like state of amazement.==
One of the guidelines that I set up for myself was to find fun in experimenting. This is a field where the pioneers did a lot of throwing together various on-hand chemicals and dyes and came up with amazing ways to visualize what they saw, many dye systems also later being designed due to chemical knowledge, then at some point... everything becomes a catalog of "there is a recipe/method to do that already". But with so many different materials available to us - food coloring, markers, fabric dyes - there may exist a chance of using isopropanol, vinegar, nail polish remover, or other household solutions in combination with dye immersion or dye exposure/washings - there might be something that makes a sample just ..pop.., or be a two-drop solution to observe cell nucleii very sharply that replaces an existing more involved process. "Staining with x and washing with ethanol has been the way we do xx since the first days when only three microscopes existed in the world..." may be fine and dandy, but they didn't have the new neon-bright artificial food colorings we have access to, or the ability to extract the chromophores out of a crayola marker.
So I have made a lot of messes routinely testing such things, and making mixtures/dilutions of solutions that give good results for looking at different materials, or work well to dye yeast to feed to other beasties and watch little purple orbs get consumed and digested...
I made an adjustable polarizer unit by cutting up a plastic Easter egg just-so that fits nice around my light source, with a lens cut out of some glasses from a 3d movie, and place another unit cut from the other lense into the microscope body. This lets me rotate the source light while both objectives and camera view through a fixed polarizer, to find the best results.
I am now in the process of creating a variety of Rheinberg filters and pseudo-darkfield filters to make it easier to visualize and share my pond-water creatures on video/pictures since they turn out so much nicer with optical staining techniques and are easier to look at. And its a creative process as well, to mix and match combinations, or adjust filter geometries, to get some surprising and amazing results.
