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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.
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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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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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