by Chris Thomas, Milton UK

Scale - circle diameters equivalent to circa 7 mm. Images © Chris Thomas
 
 

Key to images

This is my second page on garden seeds. I am sure that I could generate many more but I do not want to deprive you of the pleasure! My thanks again go to Jane and Marcia and Co for contributing to my collection!

More importantly, I would like to encourage people to aquire a pocket lens of 10x magnification and just look at subjects that come to hand. The magnification may be small but already it affords a new window to everyday objects and often reveals things that we would normally overlook. Economically priced and with a necklace or thong, a good hand lens provides a far more useful present to a child or young adult than a high power microscope. A search of Amazon.com came up with three possible useful books to go with them, though I have not seen them and cannot vouch for their quality!!:

Adventures with a Hand Lens by Richard Headstrom (1977)

Experiments with a hand lens by Salvatore Tocci (2002)

The World of the Small: Nature Explorations with a Hand Lens by Michael Elsohn Ross et al (1993)

Perhaps there is a future project for one or a team of us out there!

For those wishing to go into a more technical approach, there is a range of options to achieve a similar effect or access to objects of this size. Use of a flatbed scanner at high resolution, the use of digital or film cameras with macro facility or low power stereo-microscopy. Search the Micscape archives for the numerous helpful articles covering these areas.

The above pictures were taken with a Unilink adaptor linked to a digital camera focussed at infinity and placed in the eyepiece tube of a simple ex-Open University low power stereomicroscope. I get vignetting but am able to live with it especially as the image size in pixels for Internet pictures is not great.

Other Micscape contributions with images of seeds are:

http://homepages.tesco.net/~chris.jrthomas/

Microscopy UK Front Page
Micscape Magazine
Article Library

© Microscopy UK or their contributors.
Published in the June 2003 edition of Micscape Magazine.

Please report any Web problems or offer general comments to the Micscape Editor.

Micscape is the on-line monthly magazine of the Microscopy UK website at http://www.microscopy-uk.org.uk with mirror site at http://www.microscopy-uk.net.