Occasionally I’ll buy a little bit of a ‘lucky dip’ selection of slides to image on the microscope, especially if the same seller has a number of them for sale at the same time. At the weekend a box of 8 slides came through, and I wanted to share some of the images from a few of the slides. Images were done on my Olympus BHB microscope and have been reduced in resolution for sharing here.

First is a diatom slide, an Actinoptychus hexagonus by W.A. Firth, imaged using a 60x Olympus Splan Apo NA 1.4 objective with oblique 450nm illumination.

Lots of lovely detail in the 60x image (this was a stack of 24 images). There are actually 2 diatoms on the slide, and here’s what they look like together, using a 10x objective and oblique light.

The main 60x image was of the one of the right. Here’s the slide itself.

Next is another diatom slide, this time a strew from Oamaru. I only have a very preliminary image of one of the diatoms I found on this, as I then went on the Diatom Images facebook page to get an ID for it (I’d not seen one before). It is apparently Brightwellia coronata. Single image with a 20x objective.

Finally for now, something a bit different – Salicine crystals imaged using cross polarized light and 4x Zeiss Planapo objective.

And the slide itself.

There’s a few more in the box to look at….

This box of slides cost me about £8 per slide including delivery, and will certainly give me plenty of enjoyment with trying to image them. I’m a huge advocate of second hand and older slides, and they are well worth checking out.

As always, thanks for reading, and if you’d like to know more about my work, i can be reached here.