{"id":1727,"date":"2011-04-05T16:37:49","date_gmt":"2011-04-05T20:37:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/kotrc\/?p=1727"},"modified":"2011-04-05T16:37:49","modified_gmt":"2011-04-05T20:37:49","slug":"objectively-speaking","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/kotrc\/2011\/04\/05\/objectively-speaking\/","title":{"rendered":"Objectively Speaking"},"content":{"rendered":"

After yesterday’s near-meltdown, thankfully prevented by some DSA-administered seawater to keep the angry fuel rod casings from releasing rageioactivity, back to grappling with the imaging issue today. Checked online and found a PDF describing the Olympus lenses I have to play with\u2014the nominal working distance for both of them is around half a millimeter. Measuring the thicker slide I had trouble with yesterday confirms that the sample is about 1mm from either side of the slide\u2014beneath about 1mm of canada balsam plus cover slip on one side, and about 1mm of glass slide on the other. So no hope really for those thickness slides with the objectives I’ve got, plus any that have more than about .4 mm of canada balsam, which is many of them (I’m guessing half or so).<\/p>\n

Trawled the internet a bit more to find out about long working distance objectives. It would appear that something like the Olympus LWD CD Plan would do the trick\u2014it has a nominal working distance of 2.04 mm, which ought to be enough for even the most heavily embedded ones. It only has a numerical aperture of about 0.55 though, so the questions then are:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. How much does an objective like this cost?, or<\/li>\n
  2. Does Jacques have one I could borrow, or know someone who does?, and most importantly, if so<\/li>\n
  3. Are the thinner-walled shell thicknesses measurable with a 40x objective<\/li>\n
  4. Do any of the slides actually have the species I wanted on them?<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    I should be able to answer number 3) by using a properly prepared, non-canada-balsam-ocean slide with thin-walled rads on it, and seeing how thin of a feature I’m able to resolve using the camera system. But I also need to, of course, still answer the overarching question, number 4).<\/p>\n

    First, I did a bit more blind googling and found another, better Olympus lens\u2014the LUC Plan FLN 60x, with a numerical aperture of 0.7 and a working distance of 1.5-2.2mm, plenty to get right in there. The main drawback I can see\u2014besides not knowing whether it would work for imaging stuff under a coverslip\u2014is that it costs north of $2000. Then again, this might be what makes my thesis a reality. However, as I am finding out on further reading, these new Olympus lenses seem to be made for infinity-corrected <\/em>microscopes, rather than the fixed tube length (of 170 mm) design of our microscope. Pants.<\/p>\n

    Anyway. I wasted a good couple of hours googling around for lenses, and all I could find in the end were indications in old catalogues that suitable lenses (like the first one mentioned) exist\u2014but none for sale anywhere. The closest I could find was here<\/a>, a 60x Nikon LWD objective, although it doesn’t say how long the working distance is on it and I couldn’t find the appropriate Nikon catalogue to tell me. So much for question 1).\u00a0I did also walk over to Jacques’ office to see if he would sign my progress report form, and see if he had any helpful objectives, or perspectives, or even adjectives, but he wasn’t there. So question 2) is not answerable right now.<\/p>\n

    Well, I’m pretty well shit out of ideas on this front so I’m moving on to answer question 4).\u00a0On to the microscope.<\/p>\n

    One more slide had nothing… and one had at least six individuals of one species of one of my lineages! Hallelujah! A small success, a small relief, at last. There is hope. Somewhere, there is hope!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    After yesterday’s near-meltdown, thankfully prevented by some DSA-administered seawater to keep the angry fuel rod casings from releasing rageioactivity, back to grappling with the imaging issue today. Checked online and found a PDF describing the Olympus lenses I have to play with\u2014the nominal working distance for both of them is around half a millimeter. Measuring […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2222,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14607,13584],"tags":[6277,16243],"class_list":["post-1727","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-research-journal","category-timekeeping","tag-motivation","tag-rad-lineages"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/kotrc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1727","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/kotrc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/kotrc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/kotrc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2222"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/kotrc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1727"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/kotrc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1727\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1730,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/kotrc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1727\/revisions\/1730"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/kotrc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1727"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/kotrc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1727"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/kotrc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1727"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}