First Pic Post

[clengman]

I had a little downtime at work and was playing around a little. Got a couple pictures of the slide I made with my cell phone on the Fisher Micromaster I have at my bench. These were taken with the 10x objective through a 10x eyepiece. They are cropped to maybe 50% of the original field of view.

The quality of the photos is nothing to write home about and the white balance is pretty far off, but I really liked them aesthetically. Any guesses what this is?

20180321_142051.jpg (150.38 KiB) Viewed 2281 times

20180321_142224.jpg (123.86 KiB) Viewed 2281 times

[IanW]

I had a little downtime at work and was playing around a little. Got a couple pictures of the slide I made with my cell phone on the Fisher Micromaster I have at my bench. These were taken with the 10x objective through a 10x eyepiece. They are cropped to maybe 50% of the original field of view.

The quality of the photos is nothing to write home about and the white balance is pretty far off, but I really liked them aesthetically. Any guesses what this is?

20180321_142051.jpg20180321_142224.jpg

These are fantastic designs - they look like sections through wood but I have no idea what they actually are. Great stuff!

[clengman]

Thanks! It was kind of a happy accident. I was just searching through the chemical cabinet for substances with 1) low melting temps and 2) little toxicity. These are spherullites of niacinamide. I just put a little on a slide, covered with a coverslip, melted on a hot plate and let it recrystallize at room temp.

I don't have a temperature-controlled hotplate so I don't know exactly how hot the slide got. The Tm of niacinamide is around 130C and I think it begins to decompose at a temperature not much higher than that. I think the brown color on the slide is probably some products of thermal decomposition. I'm not a chemist so can't say for sure what those products would be.

I didn't know to expect these spherullite-type crystals and it was a surprise to watch them growing. Fun times!

I'm anxious to get some polarizing film to have a look at these with crossed polarizers. I think they'll be pretty interesting.

I made a couple slides of crystals grown from solution in 70% ethanol as well. They are nice, and I think they'll look pretty spectacular with crossed polarizers, but I really prefer these crystals from the melt phase in bright field.

[JimT]

I'm anxious to get some polarizing film to have a look at these with crossed polarizers

Looking forward to those images as well.