well I have my new microscope and a set of pre-prepared slides... Once I set it up and learn to use it, I'll have completed my early scientific revolution larp trifecta: pendulum clock, telescope, microscope
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the microscope is frankly intimidating... I haven't ventured anywhere near biology since 10th grade in 1990... and I don't think I've ever looked through a high quality bench microscope. Our high school lab had rather crappy ones that we got use one time.
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I probably logged several hundred hours of telescope time by the time I finished high school, so I have a certain comfort with that, but microscopes are basically a mystery. I'll have to learn to make slides.
Initial photos. Got the cheapest 1.3M camera available, since the quality cameras were more expensive than the microscope itself, but this is good enough for me. Bit of a tiny bug wing, some silk fibers, bit of some random tissue (bought a bunch of starter slides)
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The depth of field of the camera is limited as is the field of view, relative to what I can see through the eyepieces, and getting both eyepieces and the camera to focus at the same time is tricky. But very pleased with first "hello microscopic world"
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Now I need some microscope twitter friends. Is microscope twitter a thing? @DavidRalin do you know?
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I basically have no orientation here. Okay, so there's this entire universe of stuff down there. I have a basic high-school biology level sense of what that stuff is... cells, tissues, etc. But I don't have a handle on it really 🤔
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Ok. First big realization: I have NO idea what I'm looking at. The slide says "pig adipose cell" or "mouse epithelial cell" and I can focus and look at it at various magnifications... but I can't actually figure out what the cell boundary is or what the various doodads are.
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Second learning: even though these are approximately 2d things I'm looking at, thin, translucent slices of tissue mounted on slides, there's still a 3rd dimension at the higher magnifications. You have to keep adjusting the focus to see details at different depths.
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Interesting diff from telescopes, where distances are so vast, one focal adjustment makes all of (for eg) Jupiter equally sharp. Or even the moon. At least I haven't noticed any depth-of-field effects with even the moon. The ratio of depth to distance for moon is 0.00451653411 🤔
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The thinnest specimens are apparently around 5μm, or 0.005mm. If the distance to the objective is 1mm, that's a ratio comparable to the moon in a telescope, so I'm missing something, because the moon doesn't seem to present such focusing issues.
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Something just hit me. Everybody sees the same Jupiterin a telescope but my bio slides are uniquely mine. Even though I bought a cheap set of 100 standard specimen slides, they are different from what other customers get. So your pig cell slide is not my pig cell slide.
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Slime mold! Just found a little 1cm square of slime mold that sent me a few years back for contributing to an art thing she was doing (the slime mold came with the book she made), and now that I have a microscope I can actually look at it.
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Need to figure out how to mount this on a slide. The movie above is through the plastic baggie.
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I’d totally forgotten this thing till I found the slime mold. My actual thing was an interview with Jenna about decentralized orgs and management. Found the book the mold came in. Only moldy-by-design book I own. 🤣
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