Fan palm bloom

gpmatthews · Post by **gpmatthews** » Sat May 19, 2007 2:35 pm

For the first time our fan palm has flowered

Wild M8 Microscope
25 images/Helicon Focus
diffuse filament lamp

Microscope: Zeiss Standard 16
Ocular: Watson x8 compensating
Objective: Zeiss plan x1.6 - 5
100W filament lamp with diffuser
LED backlighting
40 images/Helicon Focus

If anyone can identify the species I'd be pleased - we have long since lost the nursery label...

rjlittlefield · Post by **rjlittlefield** » Tue May 22, 2007 10:04 am

Graham,

You had me pondering a bit, to see a whole palm tree in the Microscope Gallery!

The series is very interesting, but the overview shots are somewhat disruptive to the gallery. To conform with posting guidelines the first image should be linked with [url] instead of [img]. I agree, that would detract a little from this particular posting, but it's a price we must pay to keep the galleries focused on small stuff. A thought for next time...

The microscope stacks are very well done. I have never looked closely at a real palm flower, and now I'm quite confident about what I'll see! Nice job.

--Rik

gpmatthews · Post by **gpmatthews** » Wed May 23, 2007 3:21 pm

Sorry Rik, - it was done this way after some thought, as I think that the interpretation of the image is an important aspect, and an overview is useful for many microscopic images. In this case, I wanted to take the viewer from the full object through to the smallest flower as a sequence and the aesthetic appeal of having all images and no links won out. I tried to get the pollen as a final subject, but doing it dry with the stereo microscope proved just a little too challenging...

...maybe next time!