In my blog as well as presenting some serious science, I try and bring you interesting and quirky items I come across. Today’s post falls into the ‘interesting and quirky’ and is something I’ve been able to find out almost nothing about online. It is a Carl Zeiss Quarz Silberfilter (Quartz Silver filter) which I ..read more

It’s always nice to get some recognition for your work, and this year I managed to get an award for photomicrography from the Quekett Microscopical Club for one of my diatom pictures. The slide was of Triceratium polycistinorum from Kamischev, Russia. Current name Entogoniopsis polycistinora. Single example on the slide. Described as ‘Rare’. Prepared by ..read more

This is something which goes back to my early days of exploring microscopy in 2020. I bought a slightly mysterious lens, a 50x Leitz Pv NA 1.0 glycerine immersion objective, which has designed to be used with a 0.18mm thick quartz coverslip. I originally wrote about this here. At the time when I tested it ..read more

A few weeks ago I managed to get a microscope slide of bandage from Mummy ‘1770’. Mummy cloth slides do appear occasionally and as I didn’t have one in my collection I thought it would be interesting to image. Mummy 1770 is in Manchester University and in the mid 1970s was unwrapped for study (more ..read more

Last year I was asked if I wanted to write an article for a special edition of the International Journal of Cosmetic Science which was to be celebrating the career of the well known skin research Professor Tony Rawlings. I’ve had the pleasure of working with Tony on a couple of occasions, and I’d like ..read more

As always, it is great to see a new article being published. This one is in the Quekett Journal of Microscopy and is something I’ve written on initial prototyping of a new dark ground condenser for my UV research, based on the use of a fused silica Axicon lens. Very early stages, but this shows ..read more

As regular readers will know I have been doing a lot of microscopy research recently. I’ve ended up producing a lot of very high resolution images of different diatoms and I’ve been asked what I was planning on doing with them – was I going to produce a book or something else. I’ve settled on making a new website which is now live. It is called Diatomimaging.com (click on the link to access it). The site is a virtual museum, with a blend of science and hopefully some art as well. On there are my images of diatoms, along with details on how they were taken. I’ve also included photos of the slid ..read more

Yesterday I found myself in need of an article published in the journal Diatom Research. As I do not have academic access to this journal, it was going to cost me a significant amount to download and read it (45GBP for 48 hour download access). I mentioned this on the Diatom Images Facebook page, and someone mentioned I should check out the International Society for Diatom Research, and think about becoming a member. Membership allows free access to the journal Diatom Research. And get this, annual membership is 40GBP. So by becoming a member for the year it costs me less than the prices of ac ..read more

Bit of an update today on a new piece of equipment for my UV microscopy work. A few days ago I was at a Quekett Microscopical Club meeting, and one of my microscopy friends approached me and offered me something they had recently got as part of a consignment of microscope parts – a condenser made by Beck and described as ‘Quartz condenser, NA 1.25, W.I.’. I nearly fell off my seat, as quartz condensers are rather rare. Anyway I jumped at the chance to have it, and this post shares some initial images of it, and shows the transmission through it in the UV. Here’s the condenser. It came in a mo ..read more

Firstly, apologies for not posting a lot recently. My wife and I had a holiday in Tasmania in January, and I am still going through the photos from that (it’ll be done by the end of the month, fingers crossed). I have done a bit microscopy in my down time though, and it got me wondering, what would be my wish list for diatoms to image? I’m sharing some thoughts on this today, some of my wish list I have and others that I have yet to image. These images were done using my modified Olympus BHB microscope, and have been reduced in resolution for sharing here (the original are much higher resoluti ..read more