Tag: online microscope

Stomata of a Basil Leaf

It’s not always easy to see stomata, the pores on the surfaces of leaves that allow plants to breathe. I tried the leaves of pepper and tomato plants with a dissecting microscope to no avail. However, compared to these, the stomata on basil leaves were enormous. They were actually visible on the lowest magnification (6x), but the higher magnification is necessary to make out the detail.

For these pictures, I was lucky enough to have gotten to try out one of Leica’s research grade, digital microscopes (the DMS1000b). Given that I only had a hour or so, I did not take the time to experiment with all the optimization options, however, the pictures turned out remarkably well, none-the-less. In particular, you might note the highest magnification images, labeled 48(d)x, are just digital enlargements from the 48x magnification pictures.

Having the built in camera makes it an awful lot easier to put images into the online microscope app, and I suspect will make focus stacking a lot easier as well. Since this scope is a bit out of the range of my small high-school budget, I really need to figure out a good, solid way of mounting my point-and-shoot cameras on the microscopes I have.

An Online Microscope

Now that I have a new set of microscopes I didn’t think I would actually need to have an online, simulated microscope to show samples. However, I thought having a series of picture that I could scroll through would be useful to illustrate microscopy concepts such as depth-of-field when I talk about them to the whole class. Once I’d created the depth-of-field simulation, I figured it would not be too much extra trouble to put in a few different magnification levels. Now I have this embeddable online microscope simulator.

It’s started off with a single fly wing as a sample, but I’ll be adding to it as I take more pictures.

Depth of Field Demonstration: On a Simulated Microscope

At higher magnifications, microscope lenses will only be able to focus on layers within your specimen. You could take a series of images with different focal planes and stack them together, but without a camera mounted on the microscope, getting images to line up right for focus stacking is quite the challenge. The alternative is focusing in and out until you get a feeling for the three dimensional shape of the specimen.

Since I don’t have a camera mount I’ve created an html5/javascript page that simulates focusing in and out of a sample. It’s embedded above, but a direct link is here.

You can use the knobs to the right of the image to adjust the focal plane. You should be able to see hairs on the top and bottom of the transparent wing.