[VOD] MicroCinema 4K - A Bacillaria Ballet and other Creek Critters!

Wanna do microscopy like me? Join the Discord!
/ discord
00:00:00 Intro
00:04:00 Diatom Arrangement Slide
00:12:10 FIRST SLIDE
00:13:55 SO MANY BACILLARIA
00:17:18 What's special about bacillaria
00:25:00 Closterium
00:27:12 Lil' peets
00:34:00 Cool darkfield scene
00:39:32 Why are diatoms red in polarized light?
00:41:25 PERFECTLY NORMAL NOISE
00:51:35 Pleurosira in DIC
00:58:50 Gastrotrich DIC
01:01:50 SLIDE 2 - Stentor coeruleus
01:08:46 lil' S. coeruleus
01:11:10 Very flat flatworm
01:18:12 Diatoms assaulting a Stentor
01:23:35 SLIDE 3 - Deep well with spirogyra
01:29:34 Cool polarized light effects
01:41:25 Hassling vaginicola
01:44:00 SLIDE 4 - I think I smushed it...
01:46:25 THE PURPLE THING!
01:51:58 Purple nassulid in DIC
01:54:34 Purple nassulid in BF
01:56:50 Purple nassulid in phase contrast
02:00:10 This one's black instead of purple!
02:03:04 Nassulid full of diatoms
02:13:16 Purple boi - 60x Oil Imm

[@nomdeplume7624]

You mention that you've specially prepared slides for higher-magnification microscopy. I'd be interested to hear what your slide and sample prep techniques are - a reference would be good, but a slide/sample prep video would be great!

[@diettoms]

In general the goal is simply to get your specimens directly underneath a coverglass of .17mm thickness. I use high precision #1.5H coverglasses which have a tightly controlled thickness close to .17mm. After that you just need to make sure that when you get your specimens on the slide you don’t include any thick debris that will prop the coverglass up. To help keep the coverglass from smushing stuff, I put some dabs of vaseline on the corners although I’ve found that this is somewhat unreliable especially when it’s warm and the vaseline doesn’t provide much resistance. Still mulling over some better approaches to this!

[@jimzielinski946]

Excellent photography. For the objectives i have with correction colars, im not sure if the compensation is only for the cover glass or if it includes the water or fixative between the cover slip and the specimen. For fixed diatom specimens i like to use image stacking to capture more detail.

[@diettoms]

All objectives are designed to optimally image thin objects immediately below (as in zero additional depth) the specified coverglass thickness. Deviations from this thickness lead to spherical aberration. Your correction collar is primarily designed to compensate for thickness differences between coverglasses. However, when focusing down through additional media, you will pick up additional spherical aberration (one exception being water media and water immersion objectives). The correction collar can be used to partially compensate for this increased depth. When I use my 40x and notice spherical aberration, I will often find the underside of the coverglass, then focus down to the subject to get a sense of how deep it is. Then I will turn my correction collar a bit from the “true” coverglass thickness to compensate and achieve sharper imagery. If one were highly motivated, they could probably calculate the ideal thickness setting to turn to based on knowing the thickness of the coverglass and the specimen depth. I just do it by feel. For imaging carefully mounted diatoms without a lot of height variation, you can probably just set to one depth and be done with it. But if you want better stacking results for frustules that have a lot of height variation, you may want to try slightly tuning the correction collar as you focus down.

[@jimzielinski946]

@@diettoms interesting ideas. I'm going to have to try those techniques. Thanks!

[@rokoksin198]

hi toms. your work are awesome. btw how to get blue background?

[@diettoms]

Thank you - I’m using a technique called differential interference contrast for a lot of this. It is a sophisticated and pretty expensive technique. For similar results at lower magnifications, though, you might check out this video where I show how you can get similar results with simple filters: m.ua-cam.com/video/F7eUixvT3u8/v-deo.html

[@enesgul3067]

May I know the which microscope, objective and camera you use? Thank you!