It’s been pouring with rain outside since first thing this morning, so a good time to dust off the microscope and do a bit of photomicroscopy.

Here is a 10-frame mosaic of a Thyroid Gland taken with the Canon 5D MkII.

I used the research trinocular microscope and the Canon 5D MkII to grab a x20 focus-stacked image of the hornet’s eye which you can see HERE.

This is a 30-frame focus-stacked photomicroscopy image of Cabbage White butterfly eggs on the underside of a Runner Bean leaf.

Magnification x20, research trinocular microscope, Canon 5D MkII ISO100.

This is a 15-frame microscopy image of a Fruit Fly (Drosophila).  Each frame is a 2-exposure focus-stack using Helicon Focus software.

Magnification is x50 using a research trinocular microscope and a Canon 5D MkII DSLR.

Processing by Noel Carboni in Florida U.S.A.

A single frame focus-stacked image using 18 focus-stacked subs.  Drosophila (fruit fly) at a magnification of x50.  Research trinocular microscope and Canon 5D MkII.

A single Diatom at magnification x500 – focus-stacked image using Helicon Focus software.

Here is a focus-stacked 6-frame micromosaic of a Diatom Exhibition slide taken with a magnification of x200.

This image is a 42-frame micromosaic taken with the Canon 5D MkII and a research trinocular microscope at magnification x50.  It is the cross-section of a Curcurbits stem, an image I have done before, but not at this magnification.  The resulting 42-frame mosaic came out at 25,000 x 23,000 pixels and is the largest photomicromosaic I have assembled to date.  Well I guess Photoshop CS3 did the assembling using the Photomerge function, which also does a superb job on the blending as well.

Be warned – it took over an hour for Photoshop to put this together for me and I run a Quadcore 2.5GHz Intel machine with 8 Gig of RAM and Windows 7 64-bit.  So it is not a lightweight system and yet it took this long to assemble.  Just flattening the final image took nearly half an hour!!

These massive mosaics are great fun (I wish I had enough clear skies to put together massive deep-sky mosaics – but even the mini-WASP array won’t help me out too much with that problem) – but in future I will try to stick to mosaics of about half this size, so around 20-frames.

This is a photomicroscopy image of the cross-section of a Lily ovary.  But this is a microscope image with a difference!  This is a 31-frame mosaic taken with the Canon 5D MkII – so the original image is a massive 20,000 x 20,000 pixels in size – that’s a 0.4 Gigapixel image in real money.  My computer struggled with even the simplest Photoshop action with that size of image so I won’t go beyond 6 x 6 frames for any 5D MkII mosaic in future.