PeterLab

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.)