Fun with Microscopes!

Recently Maryanne got a new digital camera and I was given permission to do as I pleased with the old one. I have been using it at school for various projects but on Monday I got to thinking that it sure would be nice if I could take photos through the microscope for the grade 6 and 7 students that were away that day. I remembered that you could buy cameras for microscopes but that we would not use it enough to justify the approx $550 dollar cost. So then I decided to experiment a little bit to see if I could use the old digital camera to take a photo of my cheek cell.

My first attempt was of me just holding the camera up to the ocular lens of the compound microscope. I then looked at the display screen on the camera to try and line up everything for the shot. This was my first attempt.

What you see is an iodine stained couple of cheek cells scraped off the inside of my check with a toothpick. (Your cheek cells regularly slough off so it does not hurt to take the sample. Even my grade 6 and 7 students thought that it did not hurt.) If I recall the resolution of the microscope was 100x. You can make out the nucleus of each cell clearly. The bunched up part in the upper right hand corner is a bunch of cells that are stuck together.

This was a pretty good result but I wanted to make it more stable. I found an old thick cardboard tube that had been given to me by Dad a couple of summers ago. (They had been used to ship some sort of scientific instrument's light bulb to Dad and he thought that they were too sturdy just to toss so he gave them to me with the comment that I should see if I could do something interesting with them.) The cardboard tube fit perfectly around the ocular lens. I then but it to size to ensure that when the camera's zoom lens was out it would be as close to the eyepiece as possible without touching it. I could now brace the camera against the cardboard tube without worrying about shaking while zoomed in on high power.

I gave the new setup a good test the next day (Tuesday) with a water sample that I collected from a lake that is a 5 minute walk from the school. I was able to find a very cooperative water flea in that water.

 

Here he or she is at 400x magnification. In this photo the head is mainly in focus and the body is kind of blurry. This is due to the fact that at this level of magnification the thickness of the water flea prevents all of it from being in focus at once. Also it wouldn't really hold still.

Lastly I tried to make a video. I will add the video tomorrow. Right now Maryanne has gone to bed and I need to head that way as well.  But so far I'm pretty happy with the camera setup.