ok ok, I see lots of things. It’s interesting alright! I see claw shaped trichomes, I see trichome stalks, and broken off trichome bases. Some fibers. small bit of plant material, I assume. I’ll take a few photos. For a tiny scraping off the glass wall of the tincture jar reveals gigabytes of treasured data. I could map it all into one giant image that was 20 meters tall. I see trichomes! woot woot!
ok more dregs photos.
hey look I can take photos with the watermark on there then just move it and merge layers. Labels with what the image is! wow! sciencey! You can definitely tell people what the tincture dregs are made out of now. There’s even yummy trichomes left in there…like 0.01%!
oh yah, hey if you are wondering how I get a single or a handful of trichomes on the slide for the microscope… I use an exacto blade. That damned thing can make some pretty crazy shaves of objects and smears. I could also use a needle tip. It has to be a tiny tip to transfer a tiny object. Also make lots of smears, no guarantees that one single smear you made had good data.
Dang man - impressed with your passion for science
epic shots!
favorite meme ever, go Willem!
I love to gather data and perform feats of science. The best one is my trichome study, now I’m just like “yo that bud has 12 trichomes per 200 micrometers! This one has 20!” “That one looks like there are more trichomes, but it’s just because the ones that are there are three times as tall!”
The secrets revealed by a microscopic study are mind blowing. The Amscope camera has really paid for itself 40X already…get it? hah hah…ohhh microscope humor.
decided I would take a final photo of the tincture dregs since I could see 4 tiny fibers, I would image one of them. Looks almost like a cotton fiber, but it’s probably cannabis.
that image with the single trichome heads is the classic tiny hash smear. It almost seems like there is some kind of structure to the trichomes for sure. I think they are expansion seams from when the trichome head starts to form. hah hah I am gathering ideas together for a study on trichome cap size. I am interested in how long after bloom phase do they start to form, and when they form does the head start small and get bigger? So many more questions I can answer now! How many nanometers per week does a trichome grow?? ahhh so many questions!!! Then a phase contrast study on a live trichome head, looking for structure. Oh I’m going to study the shit out of it.
I think the calibration is off on the microscope. I got like 20 micrometers for the width of a trichome head after measuring it at 12. Bleh it’s probably an error at the 4x objective, I’ll have to redo it sigh
Awww, bummer - but good thing you’re enjoying the shit outta this!!
yah the saying is, “If I’m not fucking things up, then I’m not learning”.
Hah! Soooo true.
Loving the pics!
I think the calibration is off on 100x, so that’s good news, I hadn’t used it much yet lol!
here’s a project I was working on.
Next thing I have to do is calibrate the oil lens. You can see the light is conducted ok… at that magnification but not the best. The next step up is 100X oil which will give us 1000x… or 1600x depending on my lens. But! It’s probably going to realistically be 3000x hah hah, we’ll see how that goes. Hey at this magnification, I can finally see a small plant fiber in the hash smear. 400X. These objectives have a spring loaded tip, so you can literally smash them into the sample, you are focusing so close! 40 and 100 oil they are spring loaded.
I did the math on my monitors it’s going to be 2450X magnification. wow! Ok I’ll do the calibration and hopefully some imaging as well later on tonight. I am going to make a single trichome layer smear then plop a cover plate on there and a dab of oil will do. I can’t promise the cover won’t crush the trichomes, but we’ll see. The focal point on crazy magnifications is very small, so small it looks like crazy blurs then you can see some tiny details. It works best on things that are very flat. I’ve never been able to produce an image someone else can see on their computer using this kind of magnification because of shitty light. I tell you…the reduction lens on this digital camera…ohh man it’s the bees knees! I had read some articles on microscope photography and the “affordable” option was this digital camera. The insane option for nutbars was an SLR camera worth 10000 mounted on the c-mount. Yikes!
ok well I broke out the phase contrast. The weather was janking around so I was bored! Then I was like shit, yo I never recorded a video on this beast. Now it’s called a high speed camera…and usb 3 and all that. But what I didn’t realize is the computer system I have is…this power beast for video crunching. So instead of the 24fps I thought it was going to generate I got 114 fps, I could play a video game at that frame rate. Guess all the pipelines go through the video card for encoding high resolution on the fly without breaking a sweat. It was a shocker but in a good way. I will slow things down to a regular 60fps if I can manage. Or even go slow-motion that would be sweet for dissolving single trichomes. Wait till I bust that out.
it almost looks like the goo is made from trichome cap casings and terpenes with the thc blob from the center just floating in this mass. You can’t really see a complete trichome casing, just little fragments. Same with the stalks, they must be part of the goo as well. You can see a couple small plant fibers stuck in there like a fly in amber. Forgot to mention, I calibrated the phase contrast and it seems to work great! Still not sure how I fucked up the 100x objective calibration on the darkfield. odd. Lol you have to be careful not to use the regular objective lens on phase contrast, They are not even close to the same thing.
a quick test of the video capabilities.
