Monday, May 30, 2022
Sunspots
I Spy With My Little Loupe, part 2
Friends came for lunch on Sunday, and I pulled out my loupe and my phone to show them how I'd been taking photos with them. Their six year old daughter found this very interesting, so we took some photos together. She kept bringing me more things to photograph.
A dandelion leaf |
A dandelion flower |
A seed from that flower |
A few strands of her hair |
The tip of a pencil and some marks it made |
A dandelion stem |
The base of the flower after she pulled all the seeds out |
Ballpoint pen marks on paper |
The tip of the pen |
Sunday, May 22, 2022
I Spy With My Little Loupe
After spending some time looking at the large and distant with binoculars and telescope, I thought I'd like to look at the small and near, especially when the planets, weather, and my work schedule fail to cooperate.
After reading Microscopy as a Hobbby by Mol Smith, I decided to start with something even more basic: a 10x loupe. Another of Smith's books, I Spy with my Little Loupe, helped me decide what to buy. It also gave tips on using my cell phone camera to take photos through my loupe.
As I only have two hands, I found juggling my phone, loupe, and specimens awkward until I hit on the idea of using a steel cookie sheet as a work surface, and holding my loupe in place with magnets:
I used a sheet of printer paper as a background. My loupe's built-in LEDs provided reasonably good lighting.
What to look at first? Adventures with a Hand Lens by Richard Headstrom suggested looking at the paper itself:
It had a fine texture, but 10x magnification was enough to see the fibers. Next I tried a page of Headstrom's book. The texture was a bit courser, and when I zoomed in, I could see the ink had bled a little beyond the border of each printed letter.
I zoomed in on a photo of a daisy in the same book. The ink in the photo made a woven pattern distinct from the fibers of the paper.
I didn't have a newspaper handy, so I tried a bit of paper towel. Much coarser fibers, and a pattern of dots embossed in it:
Headstrom suggested cloth. Here are the fibers of a knit shirt, lit from behind:
Pepper suggested salt. Its crystals were transparent cubes:
I wondered if sea salt crystals would look different. Its crystals seemed to be larger and more rectangular:
MSG had long, thin crystals. I couldn't determine the cross-sectional shape at this magnification.
Not surprisingly, kosher salt had larger crystals: