Microscope experiments: Bismuth
Sep. 8th, 2011 05:29 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
stephbgEveryone loves Bismuth, and who can blame them? Just look at this, taken with the usual point-and-shoot in daylight:
I focused in on one feature which I thought looked like a warrior's mask. It's shown here without any scaling (in the original post I blew it up by 200% so you could see the damn thing):
And for comparison I tried to take a picture of the same feature with the microscope today. Couldn't actually fit the whole "face" into the frame at once, but managed to get this much:
For comparison purposes I draw your attention to the round blob in the top right corner.
As you can see the colours are all different, but today's shot was taken under direct LED lighting and Bismuth is nothing if not very shiny. I'm hoping the light box will allow me to light these little things more kindly.
Here, have another one:
It's like the gaudiest fossilised fern you've ever seen.
It's quite challenging to hold the microscope up to a non-flat object, find the frame, keep the frame, then capture the shot. There's a button on the side of the device and another on the software. It really requires three hands, since the stand is so unreliable. One day I will grow that third hand.
I quite like this little detail:
I think the square is about 2mm a side. There might even be measurement options in my software so I can stop making these vague guesses. Then again, vague guesses are kind of liberating.
I focused in on one feature which I thought looked like a warrior's mask. It's shown here without any scaling (in the original post I blew it up by 200% so you could see the damn thing):
And for comparison I tried to take a picture of the same feature with the microscope today. Couldn't actually fit the whole "face" into the frame at once, but managed to get this much:
For comparison purposes I draw your attention to the round blob in the top right corner.
As you can see the colours are all different, but today's shot was taken under direct LED lighting and Bismuth is nothing if not very shiny. I'm hoping the light box will allow me to light these little things more kindly.
Here, have another one:
It's like the gaudiest fossilised fern you've ever seen.
It's quite challenging to hold the microscope up to a non-flat object, find the frame, keep the frame, then capture the shot. There's a button on the side of the device and another on the software. It really requires three hands, since the stand is so unreliable. One day I will grow that third hand.
I quite like this little detail:
I think the square is about 2mm a side. There might even be measurement options in my software so I can stop making these vague guesses. Then again, vague guesses are kind of liberating.
