Geranium petal: unexpected structure of cell boundaries

Images made through a microscope. All subject types.

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Geranium petal: unexpected structure of cell boundaries

Post by rjlittlefield »

This is essentially the starting point of the corresponding topic over in Technical and Studio, HERE.

Image

Amscope T490 microscope, 20X NA 0.40 objective, brightfield condenser illumination. Canon T1i camera (15 megapixels, APS-C format), direct-projected through trinoc port, cropped to actual pixels, strongly sharpened in Photoshop with USM 120% at 3 pixels. This is a short stack, focus-stepped manually while looking through the eyepieces. The posted image is Zerene Stacker DMap method, which gave the cleanest image. PMax accumulated a lot of distracting fine structure, some of which appears to originate in details that are real but "squirming around" due to refraction or utilized-aperture effects, and some of which appears to be caused by longer-range focusing of light by the subject, something like the caustics that appear on the bottom of a swimming pool due to ripples in the water.

I looked at several other kinds of flowers, but did not find similar "finger" structures in a rose, a small pink (Dianthus?), and a violet. I have no idea how widespread they are in geraniums or in other flowers.

Google search for microscope images of geranium petals quickly found several images showing similar structures photographed by other people, for example at https://www.sciencephoto.com/media/1126085/view .

--Rik

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