I've been spending some free time on my microscopes lately and thought I'd share some recent photos with the few of you who actually read my blog. 
Here's two photos I took of some coagulated blood. Don't worry, the blood is mine. They look like weird alien landscapes, eh?
I was really bored one evening and decided to tape my eyebrows to see if I could catch anything interesting. No such luck, though I guess that's probably a good thing. I did manage to get an interesting photo showing the structure of my eyebrow hair. The 2nd photo here is the edge of the packing tape I used, right where the little metal teeth sever the tape. You can see how the tape is actually made from several fine layers.
I took my dog to a local lake for a swim and decided to fill a jar with lake water for study. I manged to find a few interesting things. I *think* this is a cyclopoid copepod, distant cousin to the shrimp and lobster. I took some video of this guy and it was pretty interesting watching his organs in motion. Link to vid at the end of this blog.
I have no clue what this thing (group of things) is, but this structure was pretty small even by microscopic standards and I almost missed it entirely.
I consider this shot proof that even micro-organisms like to party.
Love the colors on the diatomes on the left hand side here.
This is a shot of evaporating lake water on a slide between two coverslips. I used a toluidine blue dye which accounts for the color. There's absolutely nothing of interest to be found in this photo, but I thought the visual was pretty cool.
Last but not least, here are some videos. Hope you enjoyed the pics.
http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/551260/Microscopy/microv2.m1v
A little moth decided to shuffle off his mortal coil right where I could find him on my windowsill, so I'm going to assume he wanted to donate his body to science.
My camera is hooked up to the compound scope at the moment so only high magnification shots today. I did a scraping of the moth wing with some tweezers so that I could examine some of the wing scales. While doing so I inadvertently ruptured something and a wee bit of goo made it onto the slide.
Here's a pic taken at 400x magnification showing one (and a partial) moth scale. Don't they look a lot like feathers?
Here's a 100x magnification image of the "moth goo." You can see some of the scales mixed in there as well.
Here's another goo shot at 400x. My first though was moth blood or something like that, but it looks like there's a lot more going on in this mess than blood.
I'm still trying to figure out what these are. There were quite a few of them in my little scraping. It looks like an antenna but it's far too small -not much larger than a two wing scales on average. Some let attachments perhaps?
And now to combine the whole mess together, here's a scale, a couple of segmented "things" and some goo!
Thanks Mr. Moth, rest in peace.
Oh how it boggles my mind!
Tonight I prepared another unstained microscope slide consisting of a single drop of my blood, and I subsequently dove into a vast crimson sea and the scarcely observed reality of our constant companions.
I'd post pics but it wouldn't do the life of these cells any justice. Just for the record, there are hundreds of thousands of cells in a single drop of blood, and I don't think this fact can be fully appreciated without the aid of a microscope. When you examine a clumsily prepared unstained blood slide you'll see a vast ocean of moving cells stacked like coins being hurried this way and that by microscopic currents and vibrations that we can't even begin to perceive. You'll witness the slow death of what was very recently part of the living community known as *insert your name here*. You'll at once feel just as small as you feel large, and if you're lucky, you'll perceive something even closer to the truth of your existence... whether that be truth itself, gods, or the lack thereof.
It's hard for me to set each used slide in a pile of glass destined for the local landfill, but that in itself becomes an amazing proposition.
So vast, but such a small part of me. What the hell am I?
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