More Bdelloid Rotifer

Images made through a microscope. All subject types.

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Walter Piorkowski
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More Bdelloid Rotifer

Post by Walter Piorkowski »

Image

Image

Bdelloid rotifer

Leitz Ortholux in brightfield.
45X Leitz achromat (upper image)
25X Leitz achromat (lower image)
10X Leitz Periplan GF projection eyepiece plus 1/3X Sp. Reflex lens
Canon 10D camera
Strobe illumination
Photoshop enhancements

Same subject as my last post.

Walt

beetleman
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Post by beetleman »

Very nice Walter. I like the stop action on the cilia. :wink:
Take Nothing but Pictures--Leave Nothing but Footprints.
Doug Breda

Walter Piorkowski
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Post by Walter Piorkowski »

Thanks Doug,

I know that there is lots of room for improvement here but you must start somewhere. The high speed strob sure does help.
Walt

Cyclops
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Post by Cyclops »

Cool pics! I'd love to be able to shrink down to this size and see them up close!
Reckon I'd get sucked in? :shock:
Canon 5D and 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

Charles Krebs
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Post by Charles Krebs »

Walt... isn't it fun to see the cilia in the image, since, at the time it was taken all you could see was an indistinct blur!

Walter Piorkowski
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Location: South Beloit, Ill

Post by Walter Piorkowski »

Ya know you guys. Seeing the cillia frozen this way only makes you want to have 4-5 times the depth of focus to see the whole mechanism. Its a shame that the rotifer cannt be frozen with its feeding apparatus open to do a stacked image.

Walt

rjlittlefield
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Post by rjlittlefield »

Walter,

You'll have to wait a while to buy it, but technology to do this is working in the lab.

It's a variation of "wavefront coding". A specially constructed filter is placed in the optical path. As seen by the sensor, the whole image is horribly fuzzy, but a sharp image with extended depth of field can be recovered from it by computation. The source image is a single exposure, so it should work fine with flash.

See "Applications of extended depth of focus technology to light microscope systems" at http://www.colorado.edu/isl/papers/microscope.pdf . The paper claims 8X improvement in DOF.

--Rik

Walter Piorkowski
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Location: South Beloit, Ill

Post by Walter Piorkowski »

Will have to look into this. I haven't looked at your link yet but your comments make me think of the maximun entrophy algarithem used in astronomical imageing. Some thing cooked up by the military to enhance image based on the airy disk.

Walt

rjlittlefield
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Post by rjlittlefield »

Walt,

It's related and probably complementary.

Both techniques use deconvolution to back out the blurring effects of optics. For astronomy, what's backed out is the PSF (point spread function) of the lenses, mirrors, and atmosphere. The trick with wavefront focusing is that the special filter is designed so that it blurs a wide range of depths pretty much equally, so that backing out the blur recovers an image with extended DOF.

The problem with deconvolution is that in its pure form, it's vulnerable to noise.

Maximum entropy is a refinement that allows one to compute what in some sense is the "most likely" scene that could have produced the sensor image, given what you know about the potential scenes and the system's noise properties. See http://www.astro.princeton.edu/~gk/A542/mario.ppt#263,11,Regularization procedures . (You may have to copy and paste this URL into your browser. Neither phpBB nor TinyURL seem to handle the special characters very well.)

I suspect that the microscopy problem is harder than the astronomy problem, because the range of possible scenes is a lot larger. But I'd also be surprised if some form of maximum entropy calculation did not improve the wavefront coding process too.

--Rik

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