Howdy Folks!
Itsa me, your friendly neighbourhood mario here to bring to you a radical innovative and never-before-seen concept: A Journal...
...specifically one chronicling my scientific endeavours.
I like science (specifically microbiology) and I want to do some at home. I have not to long ago acquired myself a microscope with some monzies that I have earned and have used it a bit here and there. However, I would like to use it more often and thought it would be nifty to share my experience with other here. So this is what this thread is - me sharing my little bits of science I do at home. This thread will probably also motivate me to science as well.
A little bit about my microscope (for those who care)
It is a amscope trinocular compound light microscope of a max magnification of 2000x. I have hooked up to it a HD camera which I will be using to snap pictures of the things I am viewing to share with you.
What I've Done so far
So far i've just looked at a few things here and there. Mainly just out of curiosity. Things like cheese, different leaves and flowers and some bugs and what not. I have of course done the classic observation of onion cells. I'll probably post some of these as a sort through them later (if that ever happens).
Today
Today I tried to observe some live microorganisms in soil. I scooped up some moist dirt, added water and placed it on the microscope. Much to my dissatisfaction, I was unsuccessful and all I could see was dirt - which honestly didn't look all that great under a microscope. Just like dirt.
I then took a blood sample from myself and viewed that under the 100x oil objective with 10x ocular lenses. This was my first time using oil immersion and It went pretty smoothly.
I wasn't using any staining so I was surprised by how the images turned out, albeit a bit blurry and unfocused. I think it's because I had the iris of the lightsource minimised and turned up the exposure time on the camera in order to compensate. As the microscope vibrated slightly from just general motion of my desk, being at such a high magnification meant that there was significant blur in the photo-taking process.
I was unable to visualise any white blood cells without stains, so I think I want to get one and try this again soon. I did however, find some other cells which didn't quite conform to the appearance of the rest of the red-blood cells, but are roughly the same size as them. I don't really know what they be.
images
(https://imgur.com/o8i6ppV.jpeg)
(https://imgur.com/sTKvJhF.jpeg)
Future Plans
- as stated above, I would love to stain some white blood cells (probably using a wrights stain). However for the preparation of these stains I will need to buy methanol as well (which I am reluctant to buy off the internet at risk of seeming very dodgy to dem governmentals agents).
- Would love to prepare some agar plates. making the actual agar is easy enough - I just need to obtain a pressure cooker so that I can sterilise the agar before use. For this I will also probably need to but some glass equipment of ebay (again, probably seeming quite dodgy)
- I would also like to farm some drosophila and do some experiments on those, but Poet is holding me back on this one ;(