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Cyclops
Joined: 05 Aug 2006
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Location: North East of England
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 Posted: Wed Oct 11, 2006 1:49 pm Post subject: For Charles Krebs |
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Hi Charles,I was just perusing your website and I came across an item in Gallery 2, and I was just wondering what it is?
Is it an alga or a cilliate, or both? I notice they seem to form colonies, but not quite the same as Volvox.
http://krebsmicro.com/webgal2/File077.jpg
Excellent site by the way!
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Canon 30D | Canon IXUS 265HS | Cosina 100mm f3.5 macro | EF 75-300 f4.5-5.6 USM III | EF 50 f1.8 II | Slik 88 tripod | Apex Practicioner monocular microscope |
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Charles Krebs
Joined: 01 Aug 2006
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Cyclops
Joined: 05 Aug 2006
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Location: North East of England
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| Posted: Fri Oct 13, 2006 3:25 pm Post subject: |
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Thanks Charles.
Some neat pics on that site, but what really amazed me were the pics taken with a SEM. How on earth do they coat something so small with gold!
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Canon 30D | Canon IXUS 265HS | Cosina 100mm f3.5 macro | EF 75-300 f4.5-5.6 USM III | EF 50 f1.8 II | Slik 88 tripod | Apex Practicioner monocular microscope |
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rjlittlefield
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Location: Richland, Washington State, USA
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| Posted: Fri Oct 13, 2006 5:28 pm Post subject: |
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| Cyclops wrote: | | How on earth do they coat something so small with gold! |
One method is a vacuum deposition process called "sputtering". See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sputtering.
--Rik |
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Cyclops
Joined: 05 Aug 2006
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| Posted: Sat Oct 14, 2006 6:48 am Post subject: |
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Cool,if rather heavy, stuff!
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Canon 30D | Canon IXUS 265HS | Cosina 100mm f3.5 macro | EF 75-300 f4.5-5.6 USM III | EF 50 f1.8 II | Slik 88 tripod | Apex Practicioner monocular microscope |
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rjlittlefield
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| Posted: Sat Oct 14, 2006 9:19 am Post subject: |
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The newer ESEM's (Environmental Scanning Electron Microscopes) don't require coating at all, even for non-conductive specimens. See http://www.calce.umd.edu/general/Facilities/ESEM.pdf for explanation.
There are also other coating materials with advantages over gold. One interesting coating is "amorphous carbon", which is optically transparent like diamond. As with the gold, it's laid down one atom at a time using one or another thin film coating process like sputtering or chemical vapor deposition.
--Rik |
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Cyclops
Joined: 05 Aug 2006
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Location: North East of England
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| Posted: Sat Oct 14, 2006 9:36 am Post subject: |
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I know all too well that the limit for an optical microscope is about 2000X(mine goes to 1,250) but why is this so?
Would a higher M require too small an aperture in the objective to form an image, or would the objective need to be too close to the subject to be practical?
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Charles Krebs
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rjlittlefield
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| Posted: Sat Oct 14, 2006 11:22 am Post subject: |
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| Charles Krebs wrote: | I'll let Rik provide the math  |
There's a time for math. This isn't it. 
Cyclops, a handy analogy is to think about determining the shape of something by feeling it with a stylus.
If the stylus has a small tip, you can detect fine detail; if the tip is large, you can't.
Using visible light is like using a stylus with a tip that's at least 0.2 micron radius, and more like 0.4 microns with most setups.
Magnify that by 1000X, and you're talking about a stylus whose tip appears to be 0.2-0.4 mm radius. That's already larger than the detail you can see by eye at normal viewing distance, so increasing the magnification any farther just gets you a bigger blur, no more detail.
Pushing the analogy even farther, using light to image a virus whose diameter is 20 nanometers = 0.020 microns, is like trying to determine the shape of someone's hand by feeling it with a beachball. You can maybe tell it's there, but the shape is a mystery.
Electron microscopes have a lot higher maximum magnification because they're effectively using a lot smaller stylus.
--Rik |
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Cyclops
Joined: 05 Aug 2006
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Location: North East of England
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| Posted: Sat Oct 14, 2006 11:30 am Post subject: |
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Yea I get it now. Its to do with the size of the waves of light and resolving power. Its kinda like a film camera where the film is quite grainy. If the film grains are bigger than fine detail in the object being photographed then that fine detail cannot be resolved.
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Canon 30D | Canon IXUS 265HS | Cosina 100mm f3.5 macro | EF 75-300 f4.5-5.6 USM III | EF 50 f1.8 II | Slik 88 tripod | Apex Practicioner monocular microscope |
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