As a former professional cell biologist, and therefore inevitably microscopist, by trade, I spent years using nice expensive microscopes watching various cells behaving and misbehaving (cancer) themselves. What I missed is variety. In the heyday of amateur microscopy in the Victorian and Edwardian eras, the amateur microscopist would have had endless amusement from his ‘cabinet’ of prepared specimens. Great firms and individual preparers with hallowed names like Watson, Flatters and Garnet, Topping, Enoch etc. fed a thriving market of enthusiasts with deep pockets who having bought the latest microscope had to complement it with the latest novelty preparation. Today some of these old slides still attract fierce collecting passions and change hands for silly money. Fortunately it is possible to acquire nice old slides with less illustrious pedigrees at a more reasonable price, and in retirement I have enjoyed using some of them to remedy my somewhat one sided experience of microscopy.
A while back I bought a slide of the butterfly tongue or rather proboscis, by the firm of Norman, founded by J. T. Norman in 1846 and subsequently carried on by his son Alfred until well into the 1930s. The slide was rather dusty and unloved looking, but after a quick clean and cursory viewing, I set it aside as definitely worthy of a proper study.
All pictures were taken with a Canon 40D mounted on the front SLR port of a Nikon Diaphot inverted microscope. This port receives an image from the objective via a X2.5 lens incorporated into the body of the microscope. The microscope has a rather tired LWD phase/DIC condenser with DIC prisms for X10 and X40 LWD DIC objectives and clearly had a long and trying former life in the hands of numerous graduate students in an electrophysiology lab before I bought it in a non functioning state from a junk dealer and with some professional help fixed it up.
I first looked at my butterfly proboscis slide using a X4 0.13 Plan DL objective. It’s easy to get a nice darkfield image with this low power objective and this was the result.
The simple X4 brightfield image was a bit disappointing, but dialling in the X10 DIC prism and fiddling with the analyser rotation produced that nice oblique effect that can sometimes be produced with a non-DIC objective in a DIC setup, which Graham Matthews has called variable oblique illumination, VOILA. http://www.photomacrography.net/forum/v ... ight=voila
These two unstacked pictures were enough to convince me that a stack with the X10 0.25 Plan DIC objective would be worthwhile. This is a stack of 22 images at 10 micron intervals stacked with Helicon Focus
The detail in this stacked image in turn persuaded me that a full stack and stitch panorama was in order. I took 11 stacks each of between 16 and 22 images (195 images in total) and combined the individual processed stacks with Microsoft Image Composite Editor. The resultant composite image was cleaned up in Photoshop Elements 7.
A zoomable 17 Mpixel version of the ‘micropanorama’ is available on the Microsoft Photosynth site here. http://photosynth.net/view.aspx?cid=d3f ... ed359b5f51
This is best viewed full screen. To do this hit the icon just to the right of the + symbol on the screen. It will take plenty of zooming in to fully appreciate the detail. It reminds be of the sort of incredible moulding you see on baroque ceilings or very elaborate picture frames. The proboscis goes on quite a way further, but I cut the stitch off at this point as no new features are displayed. In fact I thought the length of the ‘tail’ unbalanced the image a bit and I prefer this cropped version.
A 17 Mpixel version of this crop can be found on Photosynth here. http://photosynth.net/view.aspx?cid=3ee ... 4f0d55c956
The structure of the butterfly proboscis is a complex tube comprising two halves that are zippered together shortly after the butterfly emerges from the pupa. The butterfly uses the resulting muscular tube to suck up liquids driven by a pumping action inside the head. The initial uptake of fluid into the tube seems to be driven by capillary action in the tortuous channels at the end of the proboscis. In my slide the two zippered halves have been peeled apart and the image as captured is looking down on one half. The central tube can be seen nicely in the SEM image in this link on the right near the top of the page. http://www.butterfly-conservation.org/t ... oscis.html For comparison I made a 3D version of a similar part of my image using the Helicon Focus 3D function. As this is not the ‘Pro’ version of Helicon, the image contains a Helicon branding logo. Similar features can be seen and the section of the central tube is easy to spot.
