Weird behaviour of Sodium Citrate

pwnell · Post by **pwnell** » Sat Oct 06, 2012 10:30 am

I was trying to get nice photos of Sodium Citrate when I encountered these patterns. I placed a drop of solution on the slide and waited for it to evaporate. To help speed along the process, I placed it under my metal halide lights (quite hot). When I placed it under the microscope I saw the smooth drop change shape into these wrinkled, wavy lines. It stayed like this for about 5 minutes before fading away into a plain uniform shape.

My guess is that this has to do with the heating and cooling of the solution. Either way, under DIC it looked incredible:

Sodium Citrate, 10x, DIC

20120830-DSLR_IMG_0044.jpg by pwnell, on Flickr

Sodium Citrate, 10x * 2, DIC

20120830-DSLR_IMG_0037.jpg by pwnell, on Flickr

iwamori · Post by **iwamori** » Thu Nov 08, 2012 7:40 am

Very beautiful images, a terrific surprise.

arturoag75 · Post by **arturoag75** » Thu Nov 08, 2012 11:28 am

Stunning

g4lab · Post by **g4lab** » Fri Nov 09, 2012 10:52 am

Reminds me of wrinkle paint finishes that they used to do once upon a time.