Got A New Toy

[canonloader]

Bought and paid for and being shipped out today.

[mangrovedutch]

Good onya Mitch, you sure are getting into the microscopic side of things. I don't want to see any more bugs in my water LOL. I must say you produce some amazing results.

Regards, Dutch

[canonloader]

Thanks Dutch. I almost peed my pants when I saw the price on this puppy. While it's old, it is still very much used and quite a capable scope. It was intended for florescent imaging photography, which is very impressive, but I plan on dismantling most of the top stuff and making a light microscope out of it. I have already seen results from some of these conversions and they are 10 times as good as I am getting from my present scope. Not that there is anything really wrong with the one I have, but the Nikon just has better optics.

[LLBNY]

Not that there is anything really wrong with the one I have, BUT.....
Thids is what I say when the b&H box arrive and my wife see it before me.
Nice toy, but you know the next one will be better

[canonloader]

LOL, I think your on to me. Oh, wait. I'm a bachelor.

[archer1960]

Are you selling your older one? I've been keeping my eye open for one...

[canonloader]

I will be selling the Amscope, although it is only a couple months old, as soon as the Nikon gets here. If your in the US, I will give you a real good price on it if your interested. Shipping anywhere else would be prohibitive.

[ceriltheblade]

congrats on the new toy!
do you shoot microbes?

[canonloader]

Yes, check out my YouTube link in my footer for lots of videos. I also posted a few still threads here in Macro, and a bunch in the Stills and B&W forum, which you can search for with my name.

Taking video of them is why I got into it. I have always been intrigued by the micro world, and to tell the truth, I have learned a lot more than I ever thought I would about life in general and how everything is tied in to the big circle. Everything is part of everything else. There is no Apex species on this world, no top of the food chain. Everything dies and returns to the bottom to start the cycle all over again. You can see that under the microscope very clearly. It's enough to make you humble. LOL

This 'new' scope, and the one I already have, is powerful enough to see single celled animals and everything they had for lunch inside them, very clearly. One thing I am finding hard to explain to others is the scale of things I can only see with a strong microscope. There are bugs in a single drop of water that resemble their bigger counterparts in the air world, but are so tiny, they aren't even a mote of dust to your eye. You just have to see them. I think I posted some examples of those in Stills.

Here are two of my favorites. The first one is still alive in his jar of water...


I have no idea what this one is, but I am glad I am not microscopic size to meet it...

[ceriltheblade]

the first example is single celled?
BTW - nice examples. I will have to look at the other links when i get off of work

[canonloader]

No, neither of these are single celled. In the second one, see that string thing? That is a cyanobacteria filament. You can see the individual cells and their nuclus and chloroplasts in that. Cyanobacteria are amazing things. One of the very first life forms on earth at 3.1 billion years old. They are the cause of our oxygen atmosphere. They are essentially a plant, but they move at will, and they act with what looks like purpose. You can't watch them and not see they are doing something only they know about.

Also in the second shot, see that orange round thing that looks like an eyeball with a pupil of that thing with hair? That is an Arcella, a single celled amoeba with a shell. Very cool to watch. I have a number of videos of them.

[SirStuey]

In that second image, it looks like the brownish horned thing burst into the larger one with flagella-like things.

I know this isn't the place, but I have a suggestion - would you consider calibrating your new scope so that you can put micron marker bars into your images? Even if they're only roughly accurate, that will give us a much better idea about the scale of your images.

[canonloader]

SirStuey, I have never seen a living example of that thing with the long hair in #2, or the spiked mace looking thing. However, I did find a second example of the long haired thing in another drop of water several days later. This is a crop of a shot showing more of the thing with hair, so seeing the bigger picture would have put it more of what I was trying to show, in perspective. To me, the bigger frame looked like some alien warrior laying dead on a battlefield. Here is the original frame, see if you see that too.



As for the micrometer scale, I do have one of those slides, and when this new scope gets here, I will make up a new set of scale shots to be able to superimpose on my future shots. I could have done it here, but just didn't take the time.

[SirStuey]

I can definitely see the "alien warrior" in the larger image! The maced organism still looks like a nasty beastie!

[canonloader]

Yeah, I have never seen the other end of the Mace Monster. All of these body parts have been dead when I find them, so I think, what I am finding, are just molted parts of larvae or they could even be parts of above water insects that fell in. I don't have enough experience yet to identify them by parts. These samples are dipped with a net from the shallows of the Mississippi River near here. For more perspective, see those round things sprinkled around? Those are single celled amoeba. So even the alien and the mace monster are really too small to see with the naked eye. No danger to anyone swimming in the river.