Siliceous and Delicious

An unsatisfying day. At least I feel justified in having started late and ending early, since it was so frustrating. Spent most of the morning trying to get the damn camera to cooperate with microscope and Canon’s own software. Much of that turned out to be my own idiocy, since I was baffled as to why the software wasn’t allowing me to control the camera’s aperture. This lasted for a long time, until I realized (sound of penny dropping) that since the body was mounted to the phototube without a lens attached, there was no aperture assembly to control, hence no setting to make. Duh. Eventually I resolved the problem I was having with the live preview being much darker than the captured final image (setting with shutter speed priority at 1/125 seemed to mitigate the issue, goodness knows why). In the afternoon, however, the next frustration, this one less tractable—couldn’t get an image out of the 63x oil objective (the highest power on the scope). No matter how hard I tried, no image. Eventually caved and asked Andy for help, who at first demonstrated knowingly various condenser settings I hadn’t considered, but after futzing and trying for a good half an hour, and trying a couple of other lenses on his microscope and from his drawer, came to the conclusion that he couldn’t get an image either. He apologized, but didn’t really have any good suggestions for how to go on. He seemed to hint at some point that the 40x objective was also really good, but I made it absolutely clear that that wasn’t going to fly—I was using a 100x objective in Bristol and Berlin to make the shell thickness measurement, and I wasn’t going to settle for something that much crappier (it also just won’t work, full stop).

I feebly suggested that Dave might have an idea of what’s going on. The best suggestion I got out of him was that, since insufficient working distance might be the problem, there might be a better objective out there for the job, and if so, that we could buy it. I’ll send Dave an email tomorrow—I promised him a report of  how my research is going anyhow—but today I’m done and heading out for wedding planning chores galore.