/A toy microscope and whatever came in the way (Part 1)

A toy microscope and whatever came in the way (Part 1)

Some time ago I purchased a little geek-toy – a handheld microscope from a big retailer online. Obviously, it was a curiosity I did not need, but once I saw it, I knew I badly wanted it. It has a LED light like every selfrespecting microscope should, and magnification between 60-120x (from 60 to 120 times what your eye sees). It works surprisingly well.

Handheld microscope
With my thumb for comparison of the size.

To be honest, I didn’t expect it to actually work at all and it is better than a glorified magnifying glass. So I took on microscoping everything around the house I could get my hands on simultaneously with the little fellow.

Since I’ve done some microscopy in college, imaging the items wasn’t that hard. I used fabrics to start it off easy. If you’ve done microscopy, you know it’s best to have flat surface to image, so bed sheets, napkins, paper – it was all a piece of cake! But once I moved to something more edgy, boy did I have to be much more creative with the support under each item and the microscope itself!

 

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Here’s me imaging my mouse pad (listening to Megadeth I believe) 😀

This particular microscope costed just shy of 20 euros so naturally, it doesn’t have a built-in camera. Which made taking some photos to share here a surprisingly hard feat! I don’t have the steadiest hand in the world so holding my phone in a way that the lenses of the microscope and the camera align was an event similar to Bambi learning to walk: “Oh, there it is… Nope, it’s gone aga… Oh no no – here it i… DARN!”…

Long story short I got to snap few lovely (I find) images of things that were cooperative enough and I wanted to share them here. It was a great fun playing with this little microscope and surely I’ll be doing more of these soon. I can imagine that this would be a great fun for a kid as well – a lovely and rather mesmerizing way to teach a kid about science and what things are made of!

I hope you enjoy these photos, I have many more ideas for items to snap a super-macro-selfie of so this post will definitely have a follow-up – stay tuned!

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