Vinca minor pollen

Images made through a microscope. All subject types.

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rjlittlefield
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Vinca minor pollen

Post by rjlittlefield »

Image

This is pollen of Vinca minor, the Lesser Periwinkle. The center of the flower was featured in one of my macro posts, not too long ago.

These grains are not only huge, they're very sticky. The content of an entire anther comes off as a single glob that has roughly the behavior of a ball of duct tape, sticky side out.

How to get the grains apart? discomorphella suggested a great approach here, but I was short on both ingredients and time. So as a quick-and-dirty expedient, I tried just putting a little drop of ethyl acetate on the glob. That worked like a charm! The glob just melted, the individual grains dispersed into the drop, and as the drop dried, the pollen mostly got pulled into a nice tidy monolayer on the surface of the slide. Of course the sticky stuff didn't go away, it just got temporarily dissolved. I believe you can still see some of it, now collected as little "bridges" between the grains.

20X NA 0.40 objective, dry and no cover glass, Canon SD700 IS through eyepiece with unknown zoom, 20-frame stack with Helicon Focus (R=20,S=4). The scale bar is from a stage micrometer shot immediately after the stack.

What you're seeing is the green channel only. This pollen is water-white. There was a significant amount of color to be found in the image, but it was all due to lens aberrations and prismatic effects that did not help understanding.

--Rik

Ken Ramos
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Post by Ken Ramos »

Fantastic image there Rik. I have yet to try Davids formula but I have wrote it down for future use. :D

Charles Krebs
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Post by Charles Krebs »

Rik... are you sure you're not trying to pull a fast one here... looks like a tray full of dinner rolls!

Result is excellent. What would it look like if you converted to "gray-scale" instead of using only the green channel? Does it lose the crisp appearance?

Ken Ramos
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Post by Ken Ramos »

Charlie wrote:
... looks like a tray full of dinner rolls!
They do, don't they :-k I love those little things covered in butter but don't tell my doctor :lol:

rjlittlefield
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Post by rjlittlefield »

Charles Krebs wrote:What would it look like if you converted to "gray-scale" instead of using only the green channel? Does it lose the crisp appearance?
Yes. Not a huge effect, but noticeable. Here's the comparison as an animated gif. You can see smearing due to TCA/CDM in the lower right corner of the crop, which is also lower right corner of the full image. In upper left corner of the crop, which is center of the full image, there's not much difference.

Image

Here's what the image looks like in color, BTW.

Image

I forgot to mention, the objective is a generic achromat from Edmund, same as for all my other 20X work to date.

--Rik

beetleman
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Post by beetleman »

Great looking Images Rik. Lots of good detail. Pollen is a very interesting subject and it does affect a lot of people...allergies (not me :wink: )
Take Nothing but Pictures--Leave Nothing but Footprints.
Doug Breda

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