Microscope pictures - photomicrographs

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Andy Resnick said:
Here's a few I took today, with my new camera (Sony a850). It's sitting on a Zeiss Ultraphot III, and all except one are taken using epi-DIC. The oddball is trans-DIC. All images were cropped and re-sized (I hope...). I also have a set of Luminars, and those images may appear someday.

This is a razor blade (8x):
Mica (4x):

I like the razor blade and Mica the best. Arg, why does your mica have pretty colours? I have analyzed mica under the microscope with crossed polars and have never seen it look like that. :frown:
 
Not limited to optical microscopy, are we? Here's something a little different.

1t8wtf.png

That's an Atomic Force Microscope image I scanned a few months ago, showing a tiny gold electrode (250nm diameter, 50nm thick - patterned by e-beam lithography) deposited on a nanocrystalline oxide layer.
 
~christina~ said:
I like the razor blade and Mica the best. Arg, why does your mica have pretty colours? I have analyzed mica under the microscope with crossed polars and have never seen it look like that. :frown:

Thanks!

Those images were taken using differential interference contrast (DIC). The colors come from something called a 'lambda plate'- those images are all 'exactly' what you see in the eyepiece.

Most people are familiar with trans-illumination DIC:

http://www.microscopyu.com/tutorials/java/phasedicmorph/

but these were all epi-illuminated. The razor blade image (and DIC in general) basically converts height information into color; I suppose the mica image is similar but don't really know- is mica birefringent?

Sir Michael Berry had a paper showing how to generate these really cool optical vortices and catastrophes with overhead transparencies... I have to find the exact paper, but you can easily make things like this:

http://www.phy.bris.ac.uk/people/berry_mv/the_papers/berry347.pdf
http://www.phy.bris.ac.uk/people/berry_mv/the_papers/berry355.pdf

Edit- here it is http://www.phy.bris.ac.uk/people/berry_mv/the_papers/Berry303.pdf
 
The Atomic Force Microscope image looks amazing, and I'd meant to say how nice Christina's images looked, too!