Galanthus pollen

Images made through a microscope. All subject types.

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iconoclastica
Posts: 486
Joined: Sat Jun 25, 2016 12:34 pm
Location: Wageningen, Gelderland

Galanthus pollen

Post by iconoclastica »

Finally (after years, with interruptions) the stepper motor on my microscope is operational. It just looked such a simple project, but Murphy's long arm made everyting go wrong that possibly could go wrong.

The first results are not necessarily better than my foprmer hand driven stacks, but it's so much more comfortable not to have to step 1/4 micrometer steps by hand, which was both physically demanding and hard to stay concentrated all the way. Here's the first automatically shot stack, pollina of Galalanthus nivalis (snowdrop):

Galanthus nivalis 100x TLM in glycerin
Galanthus nivalis 100x TLM in glycerin

The grains look very different from what I see (at lower magnification) looking at dry grains: those are more elliptic, have no discernible warts but instead clearly visible leasure lines. Possible the warts appeared after a few minutes, for at first I didn't see them at low mag. Are these differences a consequence of the glycerin embedding?


idem, 20x dry (with non-suitable objective)
idem, 20x dry (with non-suitable objective)

After writing this, I decided to test it. I dropped a little glycerin on the pollen of the 2nd photo. In about 1-2 minutes, the warts started appearing and the laesura became hard to see. 2-3 Minutes later the elliptic grains had swollen to the shape of the first photo.
--- felix filicis ---

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