Flour pest ID? And headlouse and some questions

[tpe]

Sorry about the horrid quality of the pic, but any idea what this is? about half a mm long and found in a bag of flour.



[edit]
It could be http://www.kcl.ac.uk/ip/bryanturner/oth ... tlook.html Liposcelis bostrychophila?!
[edit]

This was found on a friends daughters head, and we know what it is, but the quality of the image is kind of lacking. I had expected better, but the image here at 800 pixels wide is not far from the full resolution image in terms of how much information there is in the picture. ie the larger image does not look much better than this in terms of detail.




the setup used to take it was as in the pic below, shot with the 10x objective and a stack of about 50 shots in CombineZP.




It was somewhat badly lit (using a ping pong ball and a black background) and the translucency doesnt help, so perhaps that contributed to the lack of IQ. Is the low quality mostly lighting or because the home made setup is not correctly done?

The microscope is a reciert microstar and the objectives look in good shape. There is glass in the triniocular head, but not sure it actually does anything. I have a 5x tc that came with the microscope, and other than upp the maginification it only seems to degrade the image. It works better with the home made adaptor, the extention tubes and a 1.4x tc, and it is parfocal.

If it is an easy anwer, any idea what I am doing wrong to make the resolution so bad?

Thanks for looking and any comments of course .

Tim

[Mitch640]

I have worked in a number of bakeries over the years, and found many meal-worms in the flour. Like dust mites, they are just there. All flour has them. I was going to say this is an adult, but it's not. The adults that lay the eggs are small black hard shelled beetles and I have never seen one like this. It's possible it is one of the stages they pass through and only lasts for a day or two, but that's just a guess.

But I would not beat myself up over the quality of your images, as they are better than anything I have been able to come up with yet.

[Charles Krebs]

Tim,

It works better with the home made adaptor, the extention tubes and a 1.4x tc, and it is parfocal.

If it is an easy anwer, any idea what I am doing wrong to make the resolution so bad?

Doesn't look too bad really.

Do you know if your objectives were meant to be used with corrective eyepieces? Was electronic flash used, or some other method of avoiding negative effects from camera induced vibration?