More Mossy Magnification

Everyone knows about my love of magnification, including my family. This Christmas I got this great lens for my cell phone camera from my sister. Last year I wrote about a similar magnification lens that sticks to your cell phone camera allowing you to take magnified photos. It worked pretty well, but I like this one even better. The rubber band holds the lens snugly in place and it is large enough that I wasn't afraid of it falling of or loosing it. I also like that it loads up on a little card that can be easily tucked in a wallet or pocket. It makes the whole setup pretty handy. 

You can purchase your own at this website. 

Overall I think that the lens takes good photos. The images are sharp and the focal area is good. The only issue is one I have mentioned before with lenses mounted directly onto a cell phone. Without a mount/stand it is hard to hold the phone steady enough to keep the plants in focus. For these photos I balanced one corner of the phone on the ground to hold it steady, which worked pretty well. 

Build-Your-Own Microscope

The microscope that I built with my aunt.

Continuing my pursuit of home microscopy, I came upon these instructions for building a microscope and had to try it out. As a microscope, it is bulkier than the small lens I discussed in my last post, but one of the major advantages is stability. Both the phone and the sample can be held still making focusing much easier. 

I tackled this project when I was in Ohio visiting my family. My aunt is a prolific woodworker and I raided her shed for supplies and power tools. The only component I ended up purchasing was a laser pointer that I disassembled for the small, plastic focusing lens inside. My first thought was to head to an office supply store for a laser pointer, but then a cat-lover in my family mentioned that laser pointers for cats can be found in many pet sections. Three dollars later, I had a laser pointer to tear apart. The online instructions mention a site where small lenses can be ordered, so that less destruction is necessary. 

A view of the adjustable stage and light source.

The project took an afternoon. Cutting wood and plexiglass, drilling holes for the bolts, and then putting it all together. I think it took me longer to hunt up all the supplies in the metal chest of drawers full of an odd assortment of bolts, nuts, and washers, along with the trip to the store for the laser pointer, than the actually assembly.

Some challenges with the microscope. The stage is a bit unsteady and can be challenging to adjust both washers in sync to the same height. In the comments of the online instructions several people came up with solutions that enable just one wheel to turn and the height of both sides to be adjusted. I didn't try any of these modifications, but I think they would be a nice addition. My solution to the unsteady stage was to use very large washers on top of the smaller ones. The stage still wobbles a bit when adjusting up and down, but the large washers were a significant improvement. 

Another issue is the light source that I am using. It was hanging out in the shed so I just grabbed it to use. However the light has a bank of bulbs that make the background illumination uneven. A quick fix was putting a piece of paper over the top to diffuse the light, but in the long term I will need to hunt up a replacement. 

A quarter for a focusing test.

Here are some photos that I took using this microscopy setup. 

A zoomed in shot of pollen on a lily anther.
I think this one came out a bit better than the one
from my previous post. It was also a bit easier to
focus using the microscope stand.

I then mounted some of the pollen on a slide topped
by a coverslip. The edges of the grains were not a crisp
as I would have liked, but maybe that is just the limit
of this microscope's magnification range. 

And now to try this microscope out on some mosses! I had a Grimmiaceae sample hanging around in my desk and thought that it would be a good test for the microscope. 

It works pretty well as a dissecting microscope.
We can see the long white hair tips at the apex
of each leaf. 

The moss leaves came out a bit better than
the pollen grains. I think practicing with the microscope
improved my focusing and skill lining up the camera
with the lens to get a better photo. 

Overall I really like the setup and think that it is a good alternative for having a home microscope. After the test run, I think that I could use a more powerful lens, or I think some of the instructions mention stacking lenses. It has plenty of magnification to function as a dissecting microscope, but needs a bit more power to work well as a compound microscope, at least for things as small as mosses. 

If you end up building one of your own it would be great to hear about your experiences in the comments section!

Cell Phone Microscopy

micro phone lens packaging
and case

In my pursuit of portable microscopy I came across this product initially funded through Kickstarter. The micro phone lens is a small plastic disc that sticks to a cell phone's camera lens, turning it into a 15X microscope. I had to try it out and I thought it would be worth the $15 experiment. 

Case with lens in the
lower lefthand corner. 

The lens comes in a small container with an eye-catching black and white design on the top. It is great that the whole setup is so portable, but I am in a constant state of nearly loosing it. I have set my phone down, forgetting to have the lens facing up, only to have the lens come off as I picked up my phone. I have dropped it on the floor covering it in dust. And last night I completely forgot to take the lens off when I was finished and found it stuck on the kitchen table when I went to eat my cereal and read my morning dose of The Economist. Maybe it was just a forgetful and slightly klutzy episode of microscopy, but you get the idea. Beware of loosing this small disc that is slightly larger than the O on your keyboard! Fortunately the lens is also quite resilient. It is bendable and can be easily cleaned with water. 

Let me show you what this little lens can do. I pulled out a dried lichen that I collected on a drive into the California coast range. It is the lace lichen, Ramalina menziesii, aptly named for the lacy filaments that increase the surface area of this lichen, enabling it to better absorb moisture and nutrients from the air. 

Ramalina menziesii the lace lichen

I took the photos below with the micro phone lens stuck to my Nokia Lumina 928 cell phone. The lens requires a camera with at least a 5 megapixel camera and mine is 8.7 megapixels. The center of the photos is in crisp focus, but I was disappointed that the field of view is so small and that parts of the lichen near the edge of the image are thus out of focus. The demo on the website has the entire field of view in focus. That video was taken with a tablet whereas mine were with a phone, so it could be that the interaction between the lens and my phone optics are the issue. 

An even closer view of the lace lichen

Up close with the lace lichen

The other issue I had was stabilizing the camera and taking a photo at the same time. The instructions online recommend using the lens case as a platform for the phone when taking photos. This works pretty well, but I ended up needing to tip my phone to adjust the distance to the sample I was looking at since it wasn't sitting flush against the table.

This company is also in the process of developing a 150X lens and just had another successful Kickstarter project to fund it. After my experience with the 15X lens I think I will hold off on purchasing the higher magnification one. More magnification means a smaller depth of field and I think that the 15X lens is reasonably challenging to focus. I bet that the 150X will be even more difficult. I will wait until some reviews come out before jumping on that one. 

Lily flower

Another plant I examined was a lily that I got in a bouquet from the farmer's market on Saturday. Specifically I zoomed in to take a look at the the pollen-covered anthers.

Anther

The 15X lens gets us significantly closer to the pollen than my cell phone camera can without assistance. Still a small field of view, but all-in-all reasonably good for a 15 dollar addition to my magnification arsenal.  

The pollen up close and personal. 

Microscopy for the Masses

Microscopes are amazing tools! I had a small plastic one as a kid and I loved exploring items I collected outdoors. Parts of plants, a scoop of soil, basically anything I could get my hands on I mounted up on a slide and looked at under my microscope. That is one aspect that drew me to study mosses. Microscopes are an essential tool to identify moss species and the closer you look at mosses the more amazing features you uncover!  

My family is well aware of my love of microscopes and my sister recently sent me a link to this TED talk about a microscope made almost entirely of paper that costs around 50 cents to produce. It is a really inspirational talk and I think that these scopes are going to revolutionize microscopy. 

I completely agree with the assessment that traditional microscopes are much too bulky for the field. When I head out to collect mosses I don't take my microscopes with me. I bring the mosses back to my microscopes, which stay at home or in the lab. I think that foldscopes would be a great way to take moss identification into the field and enable identification to species without bulky microscopes or having to wait until returning to the laboratory. 

I thought about submitting an application for the 10,000 Microscope Project, focusing on outreach to the public and exploring mosses in the field, but life became busy and it slipped off my priority list. I will definitely have to get a proposal put together for the next round of testing. I think that these scopes would be a great way to introduce people to mosses and enable exploration and identification without a costly setup.