Macro on Monday - Guess What

Apparently last week's puzzle photo was more difficult than I thought, maybe as the item was upside down and in b/w, anyway Wilma and Adrian receive my congratulations and the virtual Midmarsh Gold Star for recognising my glasses:

   


I wonder how well you will get on with this week's puzzle photo.
Will it be a sticky subject?
Guess What:


Please leave any guesses in the comments.
They will be revealed, along with the answer, next Monday.

No prizes, just for fun and maybe a virtual Midmarsh Gold or Silver Star.

Catkin Time

With Saturday temperatures reaching a dizzy 16C my corkscrew hazel bush had started to expand the catkins which were formed in early Winter. These come out before there is any sign of leaves:



Next to the male catkins are the female flowers. These are bright red but so tiny you really have to look closely to see them:



I decided to put a piece under the microscope to have a closer look at a flower.
The mm divisions on the tape measure give an idea of just how small they are:



I took a few focus stacked photos with the microscope / video camera set up and processed them in Zerene Stacker. It reminds me a bit like a miniature sea anemone:



I did the same with a catkin and it was quite a surprise to see just how much of the surface is covered in tiny hair like filaments:



The world looks so different and so much more interesting when I can get in for a really close look.

Micro Video - First Attempt

A few drops of water from my mini pond put under the microscope set up with the video camera:




To give an idea of size - the strap shaped object at about 43 seconds was approximately 2 mm long. That was the only thing I could see with the naked eye or even under a magnifying glass.

All the lenses are now working. The immersible ones are so close to the subject that they appear not to be working unless there is strong light from underneath. As there are no other lenses between the microscope and the video camera the magnification is not as great as it would be with a 'normal' set up. In some ways that is just as well as the little creatures soon disappear out of shot. The higher the magnification, the shallower the depth of field. As the creatures swim up and down they go in and out of focus.

What I really want is a cross table for the microscope. That allows fine movement to position the specimen which is needed at high magnification. Moving things by hand is very much hit and miss as a mm or two of movement can make the difference between seeing and not seeing a particular part.

Friday at the Flicks - Clouds

 

Wednesday was quite a Sunny day though with a very chilly wind. OK indoors or outdoors out of the wind.  It had been a while since I made any time lapse video so in the morning I set up the iPod5 facing North and running LapseIt to take a shot every 2 seconds:



In the afternoon I set it up again, this time facing South:



Have a great weekend observing signs of nature around you.

Heath Robinson Revisits the Microscope

Recently I read on the instructables site about using a USB web camera with a microscope, something I had tried in the past with fair to poor results.  I tried again today but the result from the camera I had were far from usable. Instead I decided to try once again using a video camera. The sort used for surveillance. I have accumulated a few spares over the years and found one which worked fairly well.

In the instructable it said to remove the lens from the camera and use it instead of the eyepiece lens so it would just  be using the microscope objective lenses. That was reasonable but I found the camera was really too far from the microscope lenses so I made a few mods. I removed the eyepiece, its holder and the part containing the prism:



That meant the camera could look straight down.

 

Balancing the camera in place I found it was now too close so hunted around and found a plastic ring which fitted nicely and raised the camera to the correct height. That I fixed in place with four blobs of hot melt glue:

   

Lens removed from the video camera:



and balance on top of the microscope:



12V power applied and video out from the camera connected to the USB EzCap video grabber I use to get video from the nest boxes. As well as video it is also possible to take still snapshots with it:





Some of the resultant snapshots:


   

  



which is a microscope's eye view of:


On the whole I am quite pleased with this set up. I can't get all the lenses to focus. It seems to be the high magnification immersible ones which are a problem but two of them work perfectly and give me plenty of scope for future Macro on Monday puzzles.

Red Blobs

While out walkies I noticed two sets of three red blobs on the footpath. Both sets have what looks like the top of a metal spike at the centre:



I would guess these have something to do with surveying. Centre mark for a theodolite or more probably nowadays a GPS receiver, but the puzzle is what is being surveyed and why?
I tried some searches on Google, even uploaded the photo, but nothing the same was found.

Macro on Monday - Guess What

 


Last week's mystery photo had everyone fooled or just plain puzzled. The truth is it was a photograph of an Altoids peppermint:

   

Many thanks to all who were brave enough to have a guess.

Will this week's puzzle photo be any easier. I think so.
Guess What:


Please leave any guesses in the comments.
They will be revealed, along with the answer, next Monday
No prizes except a possible virtual Midmarsh Gold or Silver Star.


About the new Macro Title:
The M is a photograph of a calculator button. The rest of the lettering was made using the Art Text Tool in the free beta version of Serif's Affinity Photo for Mac. Since I first downloaded it there have been two updates to the beta trial.