fun to look in a microscope

October 26, 2007 at 3:03 am | | cool results, everyday science

Sometimes it’s just entertaining to look into a microscope. I like this pic I took the other day:

It looks like a tiny sun. But it’s just a fluorophore solution that has dried up and left some large aggregates (which emit at a longer wavelength—the green is the normal emission—maybe Excimer will like this, at CBC’s new website).

You can also see a bleached region in the middle of the green from the peak of the laser excitation region, and a swath of bleached dye where I moved the stage up and down before the picture. You might even make out some single molecules in the center. Quite impressive for a simple digital camera!

This was actually before I aligned the beam for real experiments, so all the ring patterns are actually interference due to poor alignment. I just thought that the misalignment made it pretty, so I took a color picture.

5 Comments »

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  1. Cool! Nice picture. Say, YOU probably know a few things about dye aggregates…mind if I IM you sometime?

    Comment by psi*psi — October 26, 2007 #

  2. Neat. That would make a good desktop background.

    Comment by jordan — October 26, 2007 #

  3. psi*psi, best way is to email me at sjlord a t stanford d o t e d u

    Comment by sam — October 26, 2007 #

  4. You’re our only little sun [sp].

    Comment by rob lord — November 7, 2007 #

  5. haha, my pseudonym didn’t just come from nowhere. I thought long and hard (two minutes, at least) on it. That’s a pretty picture.

    Comment by excimer — November 8, 2007 #

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