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.
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Well, it's set up and working
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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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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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