MicrobeHunter.com Microscopy Forum

As I also collect stamps, I started a topic in the Stampboards forum a while ago asking philatelists to post their stamps featuring microscopes/microscopy/microscopists. It has had numerous replies since then and has numerous images of interesting stamps from many countries. You can see it here . So...

Glad you guys like the website. I hope it helps people enjoy rocks more and discover the fascinating science, beyond being the first and only website (to my knowledge, at press time) of photomicrographs of rocks from my country! I think Scarodactyl studies rocks too? He mentioned in another thread t...

Thanks Lomonaut, Michael and Greg for your comments. I'm glad you found this interesting. I did have a lot of fun over the past couple of months. First I had to give myself an optical mineralogy crash course, which was difficult but really interesting. Now I can do most of the basic things like meas...

Thanks, it's very interesting! When they scale it up, hopefully they could make the pattern configurable for different wavelengths and samples with different optical characteristics. Maybe it's even possible to produce the nanopatterns on a removable/reusable thin-film sticker that you can stick on ...

I don’t think ant body shape would influence speed as much as plankton shape influences speed (and style of swimming which may affect efficiency and predator evasion), if that’s what the woman did. The water is much more viscous to the plankton than the air is to the ant. Or did the woman put the an...

The USB microscopes are often used by stamp collectors. The issue I have with them (other than the optics) is that the digital images they produce have very low dynamic range so the highlights are all blown out and many of the actual details of the sample are lost. The colours are also off. This hap...

My pleasure, I hope someone will find it useful for their studies or have interesting observations and findings to add. I dug up some old printouts showing snapshots of the video feed and the computer doing the tracking: https://photos.smugmug.com/Other/n-xC6Rt/Microscopy/i-J2Tx3gn/0/e5731a8c/L/NUS%...

Thank you to linuxusr for initiating this subforum. As mentioned in that thread, a couple of my classmates and I did a small undergraduate project years ago on the relationship between morphological symmetry and swimming speed of various unicellular phytoflagellates. We obtained monospecific culture...

Reminds me of my first microscope when I was a kid - a simple instrument with no bells and whistles. Just put a slide on the stage, turn the focus knob, look through the eyepiece and marvel at the beauty of the microcosmos. No need for Kohler illumination even.

Today I tested for the first time both the transmitted and reflected polarized light of my scope on a single sample - a polished and uncovered thin section of the Gandom Beryan meteorite found by Timur Kryachko and Khatami Majid during the 2016 Iranian-Russian expedition. Although the section is tra...

Some years ago I compiled a list of microscopic plankton species (algae, protozoa, copepods etc.) that had been recorded in Singapore. It can be accessed at this Google sheet . Singapore has about 570 species/subspecies/varieties. For each entry, I have indicated the location where it was collected,...

I was particularly pleased to see ‘morphology’ included in this proposal … because there is great potential for investigation in that area. Alan Turing [yes, the genius code-breaker] did some work in the early 1950s : https://www.manchester.ac.uk/discover/history-heritage/history/buildings/coupland...

I would like to suggest having the word “ecology” somewhere in the name, perhaps “behavioural ecology” or something like that, to help trigger discussion in that direction. The behaviour often relates to the bigger ecological picture of physical environmental (such as the Reynolds number/viscosity w...

Striking pictures. I'll have to disassemble the whole thing, completely this time, and do a thorough cleaning and flocking. Please do take pictures of that too! Ok, I will certainly take pictures as I (hope I) won't be opening it up again any time soon! The trouble is not just with the vertical ill...

The shape of the meteorite section did strike me as somehow familiar but I had no idea it was Georgia! Thank you for your encouragement. I've had a good adventure so far and hope people will enjoy the pictures. It's not done yet. I just realized to my horror, when testing the reflected light on an a...

I've just completed my latest photomicrography project - the first one using this BHSP. It's a collection of polarized light images of thin sections of rocks from Singapore, along with petrographical analysis. The full collection can be viewed at https://www.linyangchen.com/Geology-Singapore-petrogr...

Thank you for the information. Good to know that I might have a higher-calibre Mark II (although that doesn’t necessarily mean better image quality as you explained)!

Recently I acquired a BH2-MA-2 vertical illuminator for my microscope, which has a much taller tube than the BH2-MA (shown on the left in the picture below) documented in Olympus brochures. Both are f = 180. comparison.jpg I took it apart to clean it, and discovered that the tube lens above the half...

I had a listen to Stinky Dinky. It works! The siren is a nice touch - it goes perfectly with the lights going on and off in the video! I decided to give the two videos a proper home in this playlist on youtube . Thanks for all your interest and hope they come in handy if people ever need some lighti...

They’re transmitted cross-polarized light through 30-micrometer thin sections of rock, which are almost completely transparent.

The microscope slide looks like this:
Try playing the video on a big screen in a blacked-out room with disco music!

I'm glad you enjoyed it! I looped it 10 times and uploaded it (not on youtube but on the server I use for my website). Now I realise I can't directly embed the video unless it's on youtube. Oh well. Here's the link to watch it for those who wish to. [ Edit : this link is no longer valid. I have swit...

Interesting, I've never seen it before! It will certainly solve my kind of problem. What is the outer diameter of the field lens housing that this filter holder slots onto? I can measure mine to see if it matches. Alas, I'm personally not a fan of this design, talking about it from an industrial des...

I'm sorry I don't know how to make it work - the only way is if you visit this website using Safari browser, either on a Mac or an iPhone. Then you can see it. In Safari, if you embed a video inside an image tag, it will automatically play the video without sound and continuously loop it, making my ...

The machined parts arrived today. To my relief, they're a perfect fit. As designed, the filter holder doesn't cover the nice engraved field diaphragm icon on the field lens housing, unlike the Olympus design which drives me crazy. https://photos.smugmug.com/Other/n-xC6Rt/Microscopy/i-KDQcqDV/0/b196c...

Apologies - I just realised the videos don't load in Firefox although they do in Safari which is a bit smarter when a video has an image tag. I haven't tried other browsers. Sorry if you can't see them!

Thanks for highlighting this. I completely overlooked the Nyquist frequency (the last time I used it in a calculation was in 2010!). I have revised my calculations above and the megapixel count I came up with that will match a 4×/0.20 is a staggering 120 megapixels, based not only on having two pixe...

The highest magnifications require fewer pixels to resolve details; while the lower magnifications can make full use of 20-30 megapixels - and sometimes want more. I tried to do a calculation to find the camera megapixel resolution that matches the resolution of a 4x/0.20 objective - I don't unders...

I shoot in 4K with a camera that is theoretically subsampling from 20MP and I still feel like I'm not capturing the same sharpness that I see through the eyepiece. I can fix most of that by exposing correctly and adding a little sharpening in post, but it's tough. I think micrographs will never loo...

I haven't done the actual maths myself, but a microscope imaging specialist once explained to me that most DSLRs have way too much resolution for microscopes. 18-24 megapixels for example will produce a lot of empty magnification of the image even from the highest resolution objective such as a 100x...

https://photos.smugmug.com/Other/n-xC6Rt/Microscopy/i-CSQcFhN/0/98d1a8d5/1280/R008%20petrographic%20thin%20section%20microscopy%20crossed%20polarizer%20birefringence%20extinction%20Gombak%20Norite%20Singapore%20geology%20anisotropic%20rotating%20stage%20disco%20light%20rock%20little%20guilin-1280.m...