LOL. I'm with Mike, please tell us how excruciatingly difficult this stack was to acquire. Its truly beautiful, so if in fact you just cranked this out with a beer in one hand and the TV remote in the other I'm pretty sure I don't want to know....

--David

Hi Rik-- You're correct, its my terminally pedantic nature...I should have read a bit more carefully...what ARE the two of us doing explaining NA to a guy who is posting beautiful autofluorescence images as of yesterday? Frez, if you really want to understand the link between image information conte...

Hi Frez-- NA is effectively a dimensionless number like f/# for a camera lens. In fact, 1/(2*NA) = f/#. Its effectively the sine of the collection half-angle of a lens, so you can think of it as the ratio of the lens radius to is focal length, which is effectively dimensionless (but not meaningless....

Hi Rene--

Your translation has had me rolling on the floor of lab all day. Wim, you need to post your "1 April Kikker" to the Journal of Irreproducible Results. Great bit of photo art.

--David

Hi Wim--

That's beautiful. I've always wondered what the larval stage of Nessy looked like...never occurred to me that Nessy had a planktonic stage...nice phase image too btw, what optical setup did you use?

--David

Thanks Charlie-- The objective is a phase version of your favorite lens family...its an SPlanApo 60X / 1.4 PL, the phase 4 ring on my Leitz turret fits it pretty well so I can use it on my Leitz scope....I forgot to give all the details when I first posted the pictures. The CA correction is pretty g...

Thanks Mike and Ken-- I'm no longer a "> 640 scofflaw" now...my browser settings were a bit off, but I've edited the files. The cochliopodium is the first one I've ever seen, but now my culture is crawling with them. I'm pretty sure of the ID on it since it has the characteristic bumpy cytoplasm and...

Hi Ken--

Mea culpa. I forgot to resize them. I compressed them and hit submit...and then saw how large they were and realized I'd forgotten to resize...I wasn't aware I could edit them though. I will try now. Thanks, any idea what the first one is?

--David

Hi All-- Here's a few amoebae which I've run into over the last few weeks. They range from the large (which I have yet to identify and was hoping that some of you would assist with) to the small (which I believe is an example of Cochliopodium). Both taken under the conditions listed below and backgr...

Charlie-- Rene is correct, your photomicrographs are so clear and detailed that the typical "guideboook" pictures and 99% of published optical micrographs of protozoa don't even deserve to be on the same page as yours. I wish I had time to make confocal and/or SEM pictures of protozoa (alas, my empl...

Charlie-- These are some of the most sublimely beautiful images I've ever seen and I have been imaging microscopic things of various sorts professionally for several decades and in my basement for longer than that... Your DIC shots make me think you have an ESEM stashed in your basement and you're j...

Hi Charlie-- Spectacular shot. FWIW, the diminished contrast you observe with your "super 63" 63X / 0.95 is almost certainly due to the collar setting, a realtively small spherical aberration error can substantially alter your image...I see this all the time with a leitz 63/0.95 planapo and on numer...

Hi George--

Nice Shot. You never forget the first time you see one "in the wild". It's kind of hypnotic, you tend to stare at the protoplasmic streaming for hours. Good clean background too.

--David

Hi Ron--
Great shot, you can even see granules in the protoplam. Now tell me, how do you and Mike get the live ones? I must have the amateur microscopy world's best collection of dead, empty Arcella tests...

--David

Sweet.