Micro-spirograph - another from the microscope

[Christopher Hill]

Here's another from the kidney cell adventure. Someone asked what the magnification might be and when I did the math, things didn't add up. The nucleus is, I believe, around 2 microns. In the full res image they span around 300 pixels - 300 x 6.4 micron pixels is nearly 1000x magnification. However, we were using a 60x objective lens with oil. There is an adapter between the camera and microscope and it has optical elements in it, but my understanding was that its effect is to spread the image wide enough for the full frame sensor (the Hamamatsu camera that normally goes there is much smaller and has no intervening optics). It shouldn't be a 16x multiplier, so maybe my idea of how big the nuclei are could be flawed...

Anyway, here's another one - enjoy!

Canon EOS 1Ds Mark III
ISO 400
Olympus IX71 microscope
From two images taken at green and red wavelengths and merged

[Kaushik Balakumar]

Oh amazing. Thanks for sharing such beautiful & rare images. And the info too. Pls keep 'em coming...

[Roman Kurywczak]

Hey Christopher,
Whatever it is has very cool colors and shape. This may sound funny........but the top nucleus seems a bit out of place compositionally and it leaves the frame. I think a pano crop just above the far right one would strenghten the comp and then you could decide if you wanted to remove the red part or leave it in. Thanks for bringing us into a world we normally don't see.

[Julie Kenward]

I thought the same thing as Roman...that the top cell seems out of place. It's so cool to be able to take a peek into this part of our world. Cool!

[Don Lacy]

Very cool image, agree about the pano crop.

[Ed Vatza]

Hi Chris,

Its the lab guy again. :) I really like these images. The images are very sharp. The colors are excellent. I really like the image and the cell at the top doesn't really bother me. Maybe because I see so many bad images cross my desk.

[Amy DeStefanis]

I'm picturing blue-green gel lights at a dance for Halloween where they've strung cobweb decorations which they lit with red lighting....

Very very cool!

:)

Amy D.