Trippy colored landscape (the solution revealed!)

[rjlittlefield]

I was surprised to find these vibrant colors and interesting shapes on an apparently mundane and rather annoying object.

Of course I'll tell you all about it later, but for the moment let's make it a "puzzle piece".

Any guesses about what this is?

Crossed eye stereo pairs, of course.

--Rik

Edits: updated title

[Saul]

Welding surface ?

[rjlittlefield]

Welding surface ?

Ah, it does look like that! But no welding tools were near this object.

Besides, this thing is small. The earlier images were pretty tight crops from 10.4X on fullframe (Mitutoyo 10X NA 0.28 with Raynox DCR-150 on Nikon D800E, 7 micron focus step).

Here's a new stack, shot with 50X NA 0.55 objective, 1.5 micron focus step. So, 52X and this is still a crop, roughly 0.148 mm wide by 0.275 mm high on subject by my calculation.

Oh, and in case anybody is wondering, the colors are not manipulated and the lighting is about as plain as it gets: two Jansjö lamps diffused through Kleenex tissue.

All speculations welcomed!

--Rik

[Saul]

Is this related to the heat?

[rjlittlefield]

Yes, I'm quite sure the colors are related to heat, though exactly how is a mystery in some areas.

BTW, this subject has at least two different relations to heat!

--Rik

[Guido]

Plexi?

[Saul]

Ceramic glaze ?

[rjlittlefield]

From what I know of the process that created this subject, I expect that we're looking at some combination of metal compounds, possibly in different crystalline states.

I expect that some of the colors are structural and some are pigment, but I am less confident about the pigment aspect.

There may be some glassy material, but certainly nothing like a commercial ceramic glaze.

Any form of carbon-based plastic must be a minor component, if present at all.

If I seem to be hedging my bets, that's because I'm not completely sure what any of this is. I can tell you how it came to be, but not what it is.

--Rik

[Pau]

No idea for solving the quiz but the stereo relief is extremely nice.

[Saul]

Slag ?

[rjlittlefield]

but the stereo relief is extremely nice.

Thanks. I confess, this last rendition required quite a bit of retouching (in Photoshop) to eliminate spurious stereo artifacts, which in turn were caused by stacking artifacts.

Maybe I'll make a separate technical thread about that process. Very briefly, it involved a lot of cloning from one side to the other, copy-to-left or copy-to-right depending on which side was cleaner, taking care to initialize the brush positions so that the clone did not introduce any vertical disparity and also maintained proper horizontal disparity so as to retain the natural depth rather than accidentally pushing the surface forward or backward.

In this effort it would be wrong to say that the retouching made me cross-eyed. Quite the contrary, it was working cross-eyed that enabled proper retouching.

--Rik

[rjlittlefield]

Slag ?

Wikipedia: "Slag is the glass-like by-product left over after a desired metal has been separated from its raw ore. "

No, definitely not the left-overs from any refining or manufacturing operation.

I will share that this subject is a tiny part of the surface of a manufactured object that is no longer in service.

I am very confident that the surface as manufactured looked nothing at all like this.

--Rik

[rjlittlefield]

One more image of a small area, again a crop from 52X on full frame. Dimensions on subject are about 0.35 mm x 0.20 mm.

This one provides a more definite hint of at least one original material.

--Rik

[rjlittlefield]

Apparently this puzzle is too hard. I'm not surprised by that -- I can barely believe the images myself, looking at the actual object.

So, this post begins a new series of hints.

I'm going to step outward, to progressively lower magnifications, until we can finally see the whole subject. That will take a few days.

This is full frame at 52X, so about 0.46 mm x 0.69 mm on subject.

From here on, the stereos will be straight out of Zerene Stacker, no editing except for adding black borders.

You can see in this one, some bits of "floating debris" that are actually due to different DMap errors in the two views.

--Rik

[leonardturner]

Hmm--small, mundane, irritating, formed by heat and involved with heat in its useful life, with a metallic look and sheen. Could it be a battery contact, or the contact button at the base of a lightbulb?

Neat images and stereos, too. Lot of work on the latter!

Leonard