The Microscopist's Mate, part 1 of many

Just for the record, all of what you find here, and in the other blogs in this series, is now available in fuller detail in my e-book Looking at Small Things.  Go to this link to find out more about how to get the free low-resolution copy, or the cheap high-resolution version: I'm a professional writer, so I like selling books, but I'm also a professional educator, so I like sharing ideas.

There's a similar free or cheap deal on offer for my Playwiths ebook as well, and to see what else I have been doing (LOTS!), go to this link.

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I wish to announce a new book to go with an amazing new gadget that I have been playing with. I will be writing mainly about the one on the right, which can be had for a remarkably low price from the Go Micro people. 

In the interest of keeping everything above-board, I got mine for free, because I work in that field, but I have no commercial interest other than in the book I am planning to write.  I just love the gadget and what it can do, so I am writing activities that only an old and seasoned microscope fiddler would know.

People are likely to find this from odd places, so here’s a bit of background that my friends all know. I am a biologist by training, a naturalist by inclination, a fiddler by nature, and a writer by avocation. I am a grandfather by virtue of age and biology, with 500 proxy grandkids at Manly Vale Public School in Sydney, where I am a "visiting scientist".

I was recently in New Zealand, where I took delivery of two ‘Go Micro’ models seen above.These are neat little gadgets that clip over the camera lens on a smart phone or a tablet. I found that I preferred to work with my tablet, but my first day was a bit of a disaster. To be blunt, even my best friends concede that I am fast approaching Advanced Middle Age, others say the silly old b's hands shake.

That's as may be: my grandson's hands also shook when he tried it, and I know my Manly Vale kids' hands will shake when they try the rig out. We all need steadying.  I decided I needed a better rig, but until I got back to Sydney, I chose to breadboard it, as shown here, where I used books.

My first test piece was a seagull's feather, but the auto-focus had drilled down to the wooden table, but there's a fix for that: black cardboard.

You can see the result of using black cardboard here:

The next one shows what I later took for a flying ant which had the misfortune to be mistaken for a mossie (it was, I realised later still, a wasp).

Notice that some parts of the insect are out of the focal plane, but there's a fix for that, set out below.

More news from the trenches later, but my aim will be an immobilised tablet with a moveable stage, with interchangeable opaque black, sky-blue and white bases, plus a translucent and back-lit base for photographing things like sand grains (which I will deal with in the next blog on this theme).

I will need everything controlled, because, coming back to the focal plane problem I have you-beaut free software that can paste together identical shots taken with different focuses. This software comes fromthe National Institutes of Health, and it's called ImageJ. The last shot shows a composite shot of a house-fly, done with a pricier rig.

My next post in this series will be about looking at sand, because I started getting out all of the old wrinkles I know about microscopy, mostly stuff I wrote for Australian Backyard Naturalist, and I am planning to share some of it here.

It currently has the working title The Microscopist’s Vade-Mecum, but will probably end up as The Microscopist’s Mate. I also expect to be sharing my ideas with the Go Micro community.

Next time: sand, starting with this wind-blow sand from St Heliers Bay, Auckland, New Zealand.

No digital zoom, using the Go Micro

Full digital zoom, using the Go Micro.

Footnote: here are four shots, showing the coverage I got from my Samsung tablet from as close as I could get, with and without digital zoom, then with the Go Micro lens, again with and without zoom.

The tablet is 21.5 cm across, so I have magnifications of  about x3.8,  x16.5,  x24 and  x65.

Now you can also see Part 2 from this link.