I thought this was rather interesting. It's very impressive when viewed directly through the eyepieces, though. The stereo image was generated with Zerene. Larger version here;

https://squattingdog.smugmug.com/Stereo ... -GKsnhV4/A

-JW:

I am more interested in mounting it on a slide at the moment. With the help of Steve Beats I have a solution. I will also try mounting one on a tungsten needle with a microscopic dab of clear nail polish, then mount that on my ball stage.

That should be very helpful for those wanting to give this a shot. If using Blender to do this, I think diving into Blender's Sculpt mode drastically improves most extrusions. Zbrush, a stand-alone program, is more complicated but has more features. I found this Youtube video very helpful. https://w...

How would you mount a micro quartz crystal 450um or so long and 250um wide?

-JW:

Today, I measured the beard hair and crystal using ImageJ. Measurements in microns (um) are;

Hair = 150um in diameter
Crystal length = 456um
Crystal width = 262um

-JW:

I want to give you a sense of the size of the microscopic quartz crystals found inside a Geode. One of my beard hairs is tied in a knot with a doubly terminated quartz crystal below it. These crystals are microscopic and difficult to transfer around too. They seem to jump around like grasshoppers wh...

Thanks for the explanations. Yes, it was shot with a microscope epi DIC.

-JW:

I know this is a poor image stack, but I'm curious about what's causing the vertical streaks.

-JW:

Over the past several days, I have undertaken the task of photographing a collection of micro-double-terminated quartz crystals discovered within a recently fractured geode. These crystals are exceptionally small, measuring between 0.2 and 0.3 millimeters in length, and are often mistaken for dust. ...

I asked a friend about this and he said just mount an infinity head and install infinity objectives in the turret. Since the Optiphot has RMS threads, you can simply go with Olympus RMS or Zeiss objectives, and he suggested using Olympus objectives.

Here ya go.

They were given to me. Not all of them exhibit this result. They won't have birefringence, but regions of different thicknesses will refract differently, resulting in various dispersion colors. Maybe eBay, sorry I don't know. The attached micro-diamond images were generated with my Nikon SMZ-10. -JW:

I wonder if ImageJ has that ability. Maybe ask in their forum.

https://bioimagebook.github.io/chapters ... magej.html

https://forum.image.sc/t/classifying-mi ... rning/9942

-JW:

Beautiful results - both on rebuilding the microscope and the images. They likely have you grinning ear to ear after all that work. Thanks. When I first got the SC and MET years ago, I was blown away by the images through the bino head. I have a couple of friends who own complete Polyvar SCs with t...

This was shot with my Wild Heerbrugg M400 Makrozoom using the 1:6 APOzoom and an old Panasonic GH3. I'm trying to get set up and testing my overall configuration and lighting challenges for a series of shell photographs (unless I get distracted). The Engina armillata looks like it had a rough life. ...