My pollen and spores

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glennbech
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Joined: Thu Apr 07, 2016 10:34 pm

My pollen and spores

#1 Post by glennbech » Sun Apr 24, 2016 7:54 pm

Hi,

I hope to post my pollen and spore findings and decided to keep it all in one thread for my own and your sake. What better place to keep it than here :-)

It's spring in Norway now and the first flowers to bloom, in my region of the country are

- Tussilago farfara
- Anemone nemorosa
- Campanula rotundifolia

It's April and a lot of other flowers and plants are joining the crowd. One of those is the Thlaspi Caerulescens. It has a curious story. It is not native to us but spread from the botanical gardens in our capitol in the 1870s. Now it's all over the country. You would think that the people working a the botanical garden would think of that!

I did a water mount. but it was still hard to find a nice photo target without depth problems. So, I did a 2 layer depth stack in Zerenestacker. I think this came out pretty clean. No dark field or anything, just my Nexus 6P.

One thing I learned, this time, is that with my setup, it is difficult to get pictures without some level of uneven field illumination. I think the sensor size of the 6P is large compared to the exit pupil produced by the eyepiece. I have applied an Astro imaging flat field technique to remove the gradient.

As you can see, I also have a slight alignment problem that probably affects the sharpness of the image. I'll fix that in my processing chain next time around.

Here goes!

Image

JimT
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Joined: Fri Oct 24, 2014 1:57 pm

Re: My pollen and spores

#2 Post by JimT » Sun Apr 24, 2016 8:15 pm

Very good first posting. What objective did you use?

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mrsonchus
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Location: Cumbria, UK

Re: My pollen and spores

#3 Post by mrsonchus » Sun Apr 24, 2016 8:33 pm

Looks like a great start to me Glen; I use a superb free utility called 'Olympus Background Removal Tool' or something similar - it removes background or you can save the background it constructs from your image and remove it within something like P-Shop. I use this all the time stand-alone - it's superior I think to my results with P-Shop.

Great post, we need more pollen details! :D :D
John B

glennbech
Posts: 55
Joined: Thu Apr 07, 2016 10:34 pm

Re: My pollen and spores

#4 Post by glennbech » Sun Apr 24, 2016 8:38 pm

Thanks!

Here is a documentation of the "processing stack". As you can see, my imaging chain is pretty dirty. Have do do spring cleaning :-)

I find this image to be "over processed". Color information is also lost. But, for pollen, I think this kind of processing is a good fit. The important thing to get is the structure, surface details and grains at different levels of focus to document the whole depth. That, at least ,sounds like a good strategy for me at the moment

Image

glennbech
Posts: 55
Joined: Thu Apr 07, 2016 10:34 pm

Re: My pollen and spores

#5 Post by glennbech » Sun Apr 24, 2016 8:45 pm

JimT wrote:Very good first posting. What objective did you use?
My microscope is a "West german tank" of unknown origin, called "Steinmar Berlin". It has "Wetzlar Optik" objectives. The one used here is a NA 0.65, 40:1. I have given up on finding more info on the scope, google produces almost nothing...

JimT
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Re: My pollen and spores

#6 Post by JimT » Sun Apr 24, 2016 9:11 pm

So 40X obj.

I see you posted questions about it on Cloudy Nights. Sounds like a good scope as long as the optics are OK.

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gekko
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Location: Durham, NC, USA.

Re: My pollen and spores

#7 Post by gekko » Mon Apr 25, 2016 6:52 pm

An encouraging beginning.

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