PeterLab

How to use a Celestron USB digital microscope (model 44302) with a Macintosh

When we first started trying to use the Celestron microscope, we couldn't get it to talk to any of the applications on our Macintosh. My mom went online and found a page that had some instructions, My Mac won’t recognize my Handheld Digital Microscope (HDM). Is it Mac compatible? Can I get my Mac to display images from my HDM?  She followed the instructions, which involved adding a file to the directory QUICKTIME PLAYER>PREFERENCES>RECORDING. (The company's instructions don't work entirely, but they helped some.)

After that we could use the microscope with Photo Booth. That was cool because Photo Booth has a bunch of special effects (see last post). But we still get picture at only 640 X 480, which wasn't big enough.

My mom fiddled around with QuickTime, which in principle should be talking to the microscope if we got Photo Booth to work. She found a menu that helped:    QUCIKTIME > PREFERENCES > RECORDING. The Video Source needed to be set to "Celestron Digital Microscope." The Qulaity needed to be set to "Device Native." Then we could record at 1.3 megapixels.

 

 Then we can record video through QuickTime and the video comes out as 1280 X 1024 video, which is the size of image we want.

The only problem is that you get a video rather than a still image. The solution to this (so far) is to stretch the Quicktime playback window out to full size, and use Preview to make a screen shot of the window.

I still might need a small bit of help with it right now because this process is more complicated than I'm used to. But once we have the pictures we can put them in other programs, such as Corel Painter, and adjust the light and color tones in the picture. So this is a lot better than just 640 X 480 with some special effects.  

Here is a picture from this morning of a shell that I picked up at the beach a while back. We looked it under the microscope. We were surprised to find these tiny shells attached to it instead of just little holes. the tiny shells seemed to be inside holes on the big shell. Some them look like clams and others of them look like snail shells. We never knew they were there before.

And here's some of the tiny shells close up:

(My mom did most of the work figuring out how to get the microscope functioning properly.)

I got a digital microscope for Christmas

I got a Celestron 44302 digital miscroscope for Christmas. It works pretty well, too, although we've only got it connected to Apple Photo Booth so far, and so the pictures are only 640 X 480 pixels until we get that fixed. Photo Booth has lots of special effects which I worked with on some of the pictures.

I am looking forward to taking more pictures once we figure out how to get the 1.3 megapixel pictures we are supposed to be able to get with this microscope.

One megapixel is 1,000,000 pixels. And 640 X 480 pixels = 307,200. 1.3 megapixels is 1,300,000 pixels. And so, to find out hom much bigger the pictures are that we are supposed to be able to get, we divide 1,300,000 by 307,200, and we get about 4 1/4. And so the pictures we should be able to get are 4 1/4 times bigger than what we are getting now!

The reason we are having a problem is that the computer isn't recognizing the microscope except when we use Photo Booth to get at it. It comes with software for Windows, but is suppsed to work right out of the box with Macintosh, which it doesn't.

This is a picture of a dime, but the letters are backwards because of the lenses in the microscope.

This is one of the traps on a Venus Fly Trap without any special effects. (Also, no special effects were applied to the dime.)

The Warhol effect used on the stem end of the Venus Fly Trap.

This is a picture of a flea stuck to a piece of tape using Photo Booth's x-ray effect.

Here are George Washington's eyes on the dollar bill, using Photo booth's x-ray effect.