PeterLab

Microscope time, February 11th & 9th

In January, we scooped up some lake water and sediment samples near the mouth of Hoisington Brook in Westport, NY. We looked at it under the microscope and there wasn't much to see. We left it in a clean fish tank for a few weeks and we same many microorganisms including algae, paremeciums, vorticella, and some things that look like egg cases. 

This is a video of a paramecium feeding on algae.  There are also a couple of voticella at the beginning. The paramecium and some other organisms were found in a water sample from Lake Champlain.

These are some kind of egg cases.

 

Here is a video of a vorticella:

Diatoms and Other Things Seen under the Microscope

I looked at more of Mrs. Lohers Pond water, this time I did see creatures swimming in it, so so the copepods might have survived the tank drying out, but there weren't any in the water sample on my slide, or I couldn't find them anyway. But I did see a number of diatoms and some other strange things.

Diatoms:

Plus some things we haven't identified:

We're not sure if this is a bubble or what it is:

We think this may be algae. We're not sure:

I also spent some time looking at fungi we found on a piece of firewood:

We asked people to guess what this was and they guessed things like a shag carpet, the surface of the sun, and  the inside of a butternut squash. It is the the roots of a shelf fungus:

I took this picture myself.

Learning to photograph through the microscope

On Wednesday, I practiced taking pictures through the microscope. How I do it is I have to position the camera lens over the microscope eye piece so that they line up so that the camera can get a good picture of what is in the microscope. My camera is an Insignia 10 megapixel with 3x optical zoom. It has a very small lens, which is why we can use it for this purpose, and an LCD display on the back.

Here are some of the pictures I took.

Snow crystals:

Snake skin:

Moss:

The edge of the giant waterbug's body:

Up until now, my mom has taken the photographs through the school microscope for me. Now I can take the photos myself.

More Copepods

I can find copepods in  the pond water in Mrs. Loher's classroom, but it isn't as easy as it seems, I can't just get one every time. I have to look very carefully for some of the specs in the water moving. Then I have to capture them with the eye dropper. There seems to be more  than one species of copepod in the pond water.

The copepods we've been finding seem to have a red spot which seems to be either their brain or their heart:

Here's another example, a different copepod from a different day:

Note that the difference in the front appendages show that they are different species.

Here is a video of the heartbeat or breathing of the copepod.

This one looks like it's been eating something green. Algae, maybe?

And here's a view of  the hairs on the copepod's tail:

Another red water mite, but this one was dead

This water mite was easier to photograph, because it seemed to have died or run out of air in some way. So it held still for the camera. Even are we accidentally popped it while getting it onto a microscope slide, we still got good photos.

Here it is with a piece of duckweed, looking very tick-like:

Here's a closer view:

Here are two views showing the hairs on the legs of the mite:

I'm not sure what the hairs are for, but they might be used as swimming paddles along with its legs.

Diatoms

Looking at samples of pond water, I noticed what appeared to be diatoms. I'm not sure if they are, but they might be.

This is a picture of one of  them:

We saw some other geometric things under the microscope that may have been diatoms, but didn't get pictures of them.

Onion cells & duckweed cells

I've noticed that not all plant cells are the same. Some plant cells, such as onion cells, have that rigid shape that you see in text books; but some other plant cells such as duckweed cells have a more rounded shape.

Here are a couple of views of onion cells:

For contrast, here are cells from a duckweed leaf:

The duckweed cell walls are thick, but they aren't rectangles, like the cell walls of the onion cells.

Close views of a fossil I found in Essex, NY

I looked at little bits of different creatures that were fossilized in a rock I found in the cliffs at a park on the Lake Champlain shore in Essex, New York in summer. [MAP] We think the magnification on these microscope images is about 40X.

The circular thing in the first image is part of a tube worm shell, I think.

I'm not sure what this is, but the thing in the middle looks either like a backbone, or another tube worm shell. 

I'm not sure what these pieces are. They seem to be part of tube worm shells and some other things, maybe plant matter.

This one looks like its got a tiny sea star in it and also bits of coral.

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.