Shed barnicle cuticle. Fluorescence.

[Charles Krebs]

Right up front I want to pay homage to Waldo ("pwnell") for this subject. He has posted some of these on a couple of occasions and I thought they were stunning. When I found a couple of pieces of shed cuticle in my last marine sample I just had to give it a try myself.

These were taken using 2 UV flashlights and a Thorlabs FGL435 longpass filter. (For more details see: http://www.photomacrography.net/forum/v ... hp?t=33123 ). The microscope was my hybrid Nikon MM-11/Olympus. The first two were with an Olympus 20/0.40 LMPLFLN. The last two were with an Olympus 50/0.50 LMPLFLN. Exposures with the 20X were around 2 seconds at ISO 100. Exposures with the 50X were around 2 seconds at ISO 400. All are stacks. Canon T3i camera.

(If anyone has an idea what the orange "attachment" in the third image is, I would love to know!)

[fonakta]

Surreal!

[kit1980]

Superb images!

[arturoag75]

Impressive shots

[banania]

Really interesting images.

I'd love to try something similar as soon as my torches arrive (soon I hope). But what is a "shed barnicle cuctile" (not native in english), I tried to google those words together and separately, but the images didn't look right at all. Are these the shed skin (exuvia) of the animal that lives inside barnacle shells?

Also please tell how you have mounted/prepared these. You pressed and dried them between slides to have a two-dimensional subject and then photographed without a coverslip? Sorry for all the questions, I hope you don't mind. I'd google the answers but I am afraid google would just direct me to this thread.

[Jacek]

[carlos.uruguay]

Super

[hkv]

Very beautiful indeed!

[Olympusman]

Very pretty -- wall art.

Mike

[abpho]

Nice work Charles. Can you say picture of the month?

[drmarkusmicroscopy]

Very nice, clean work!
The orange attachment is probably a fungus, called Alternaria.

[Charles Krebs]

Thanks all for the kind remarks!

Are these the shed skin (exuvia) of the animal that lives inside barnacle shells?

Yes.

Also please tell how you have mounted/prepared these. You pressed and dried them between slides to have a two-dimensional subject and then photographed without a coverslip?

This is a basic "wet mount " slide. The subject is in water, under a cover-slip. I usually make up a slide like this with too much water, and then used tissue touched to an edge of the cover to draw off water until the depth looks correct. Even though I am using "M" type objectives the cover appears to have little effect on my 20/0.40. It probably does have a small effect with the 50/0.50 but it still puts out a nice image.

[banania]

Thanks Charles for the details. Mounting on slides and using cover slips is something new to me as I don't have a microscope and have been using other means of subject positioning. I bought some mountant (Lubkin&Carsten) and some slides and slips of various sizes and thicknesses and have observed various expectes issues like air bubbles and second surface reflections from slides etc. For some reason water mount did not even occur to me, thanks for pointing out this rather cheap and natural method of mounting.

[pwnell]

These are incredible. I love how well your autofluorescence setup is working. And regarding the orange attachment, I saw them too - not sure what they are though.

[Charles Krebs]

Thanks Waldo...
You are to blame!
It was your barnacle cirri that stuck in my head for as long time and made me determined to set up an auto-fluorescence arrangement.