Tag: microscope

Mobile Microscope

microscope

I spotted this mobile microscope in a sale at the RSPB Shop at Fairburn Ings and decided to give it a try.

sea mat on crab shell

This sea mat colony on a crab shell was photographed at the lowest magnification, which ranges from 20-200x. With the unaided eye, I can see it only as a stipple. There’s part of a barnacle shell in the bottom left corner.

hornwrack
hornwrack

Hornwrack is another colonial animal, which looks like dried up seaweed when you find it on the strandline. This 20x view shows the individual cells that the bryozoan filter-feeding occupants lived in.

slate
Intrusion of country rock in Lake District slate from a drinks mat on my desk.

Chickweed Leaf

chickweed leaf

Even at the lowest magnification of 10x, you can see the cells in this chickweed leaf, which is just one centimetre from base to tip.

chickweed leaf x60

Zooming in to 60x you can see how the cells line up to make structures, along the vein and the edge of the leaf.

chickweed leaf x200

At 200x there’s isn’t much depth of field but it looks to me as if there’s a single line of cells forming a tube along the edge of the leaf.

Previous blog post

These were taken on a Traveler USB microscope, which I bought in 2009 at Aldi’s. The software that came with it is long out of date, so it’s taken a bit of ingenuity by my computer expert friend Martin to find a workaround to get it working on my iMac, via a virtual Windows 10 installation.

Link

Under the Microscope my Wild West Yorkshire nature diary for 20 September 2009.