Monday 12 March 2012

Diatomaceous Zoom




I posted a video before about the magnification range of a scanning electron microscope... This is the update with a slightly more interesting sample! Last time I was using 10 micron beads to confirm the calibration of the scope, this time it is fossilised diatoms; tiny single celled plankton with beautiful shells.

The video starts at 25x magnification, the whole field of view is about 2mm across.



And it starts zooming in...



And in...



And in...



Until it gets to 200000x magnification, nearly 1000x greater than at the start of the video. Now the whole field of view is only about 2um across. That is 100 times narrower than a human hair.

Then it zooms back out again so you can see what you were looking at!

Software used:
ImageJ - Generating zoom series, converting individual images to a video.