20100114_004326_Spirochaetes.avi

I'm not going to mention the name, but there's a major grocery store chain in California whose refrigerated trailers used to carry product from the company where i work, to their nearby distribution facility, always smell very bad.

  Today (well, yesterday, actually, but for me, it's still today), I took a sample of some water that was standing in a corner of one of these trailers.

  From that sample, here are some spirochaetes.  These are very tiny bacteria, that look like tiny whirling corkscrews.

  On my microscope, I was using the 60× objective and the 10× eyepiece; and I set my camera to use its digital zoom at the maximum, which seems to be about 4×.

Trying to figure out, now, how big an area this video covers

  With still images, I get 3072×2304 pixels, but with video, I only get 640×480.

«3072 640 ÷» gives me 4.8.

  With this combination of objective and eyepiece, I normally get a scale of 0.1 µM per pixel in a still image.  So for a video, it'd be «0.1 4.8 ×» 0.48 µM per pixel.

  The digital zoom, which I used this time, but rarely do, gives me a magnification of 4×.  «0.48 4 ÷ gives me, therefore, 0.12 µM per pixel.

«0.12 {640,480} ×» This video covers an area that is 76.8 µM by 57.6 µM.

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• microscope
• spirochete
• spirochaete
• bacteria