Leaves - Miniture Fir

Playing the mcroscope game with leaves of a conifer - a bush sized mini fir tree in my garden. The sprig of its needles looks something like this:

Under 10 x it looks like a much bigger plant

and at 50 x more like a scaly reptile

Leaves - Pepper Tree

From my pepper tree these waxy coated hard smooth leaves:

The same leaf at 10x and 50 x:

Leaves - Succulent

Another leaf look, this time at an old succulent, its fleshy leaf looks like this to the naked eye:

Up close the edge is pretty (at 10x and 50 x):

Leaves - African Violet

 The hairy surface of an African violet

Up close the green side look even fuzzier:

But the purple side is really interesting; shown here at 10x and 50 x

Leaves - Rose

Still playing with the microscope, this time with leaves of various plants. featured many times on this blog already our old yellow rose's leaves:

At 10 x magnification the front and back look like this:

Wounds and Gore

 Having a Dodger in the house tends to leave needle sharp punctures in one's skin; the good side of this is interesting microscope pictures.

Here a picture of my arm to show how tiny the wound really is, two sharp little punctures:

But at 10x it looks a bit meaner:

And even nastier at 50x:

After five years of this blog; this is the first photo of me on it. :)

Microscope: Matches

Wanted to do a few more microscope pictures, here a burnt and unburnt match head at 10x magnification.

A little more detail on the pretty burnt match,

And finally a super closeup of the burnt-ness

Alfalfa Finale

Getting to the end of this experiment and should eat my sprouts (the wages of science is health food?) but first a arty close up:

Also a camera photo of the tangled collection.

Alfalfa almost Leaves

After another day the remains of the seed are looking more like leaf than ever.

Alfalfa Leaves and Shoots

A day later and the alfalfa is growing dramatically, some of the tops have opened into tiny proto leaves:

And the roots are growing tiny hairlike protrusionsvisible here at 50x:

More Sprouts

36 hours after soaking the sprouts are full of activity, some of them having achieved 15mm of root.

I took this 50x close up of a root tip all wrapped around itself:

Alfalfa Grows!

I bought some tiny alfalfa seeds from a health store - the idea is to germinate them and take some photos under the microscope.

This is what they look like dry, about to be soaked for a few hours to start the process:

Microscope - Shirt

A bit more microscope demo - this time a rather nice high quality embroidered white shirt.

at 10x magnification you can see the individual woven threads (invisible to the naked eye)

At 50x, the silky embroidery  thread showing a different character to the cotton.

Microscope Intro 2

To further demonstrate my little toy; here's a look at what a high quality print book cover looks like (an Asimov Collection printed in the late 90's).

This is a 10x photo of the edge of the space ship and the 'point' at the bottom of the S in the above picture.

Even closer (50x) look at how the colours are generated around this point.

Microscope Introduction

I'm going to do a few posts using this rather clever webcam (with a R5 coin for scale):

This thing is what might have been called an examination microscope in a different erra; lighting is provided with 8 high luminescence diodes and a lensing system capable of sharp focus at 10x and 50x magnification. At the 'eye' end is a responsive 4MP CCD.

This is the edge of the other side of the coin at 10x magnification.

And finally at 50 x the bokkie's horns and the arch of the U in 'Suid'.