My first diatoms
I have been brave today, I tried lots of new things I haven’t tried before. I used immersion oil for the first time, I used my Lomo aplanatic oblique condenser (oiled) and I tried taking the photos with eyepiece projection – I have never tried that before either. I have been so organised that I have managed to do a compare and contrast of relay lens versus eyepiece projection, I think I prefer eyepiece projection.
I have also mowed the lawn and planted violas in the front garden. Very lovely they are too, the post lady will be pleased.
Oiling a condenser is messy, finding diatoms under oil immersion is a pain in the posterior but I think I did okay for a first attempt. Something needs cleaning but I’m not sure what. There are blobules in the same place in every shot. I can only assume it’s on the bottom of the condenser. I’m still chuffed though.
All pictures were taken using the Lomo microscope with 1.4 na aplanatic oblique condenser, and 90x oil immersion objective (na 1.25). Some 50 year old cedarwood immersion oil that i fpound in an old condenser box was used for oiling both the condenser and the objective. The only difference was the photography; a Canon EOS 1100D was used to take all the pictures, but the pictures marked “relay lens” used the Brunel universal camera adapter (2x) and the pictures marked “eyepiece projection” were taken using a Zeiss projective 8X eyepiece.
Click on the pictures to make them larger…
Spock's Sister Sees 
Written
on April 11, 2014