The Peacock spreads its feathers (Santonine crystals)

[Cactusdave]

I don't have many slides of crystal subjects, and was pleased to get this slide in a mixed Ebay haul. The chemical crystallised is Santonin(e) a natural product from a species of Artemesia plant and formerly used widely as an anthelmintic to rid the gut of parasitic worms. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santonin Normally I would expect to get the best from crystals with polarisation and perhaps a 1/4 wave plate, however I found I got the colours I liked the most from this slide using plain DIC, which also gave a better sense of the texture of the crystals. DIC was adjusted to give maximum extinction. The images were captured on a Nikon Diaphot with a Canon 40D mounted on the front port with a X2.5 in microscope magnification factor and a Nikon X10 0.25 Plan DIC objective. The first image is sitched from 7 individual photos.




The second image is a stitch of 4 pictures.



Finally a micro-panorama of 74 individual images. I'll try to get around to uploading a big version of this on Photosynth and post a link as its worth panning and zooming around.





Edit: the Photosynth link for this image is http://photosynth.net/view.aspx?cid=b1c ... 55d05315fe

[Mitch640]

Missed this one Dave. Interesting crystal formation. Was this mounted under a coverslip?

From reading the wiki link, it sounds like the cure was worse than the disease.

[Ken Ramos]

Look like some the things I use to tye trout flies with. These are beautiful!

[Cactusdave]

Thanks Ken and Mitch.

Mitch, yes this is a mounted preparation with a coverslip. you can see some dirt on the crystals in the first and second pictures, which makes me wonder if the coverslip was added some time after the initial crystallisation, allowing dust time to settle in the meanwhile.