On the 28th of February, the DC-micronauts met again at one of the houses. The plan this time was to refine our skills  and  learn  the issue of scale. One of the things I wanted to instill was in each of the micronatus was a sense of the dimensions of the objects we saw under the microscope. Using a scale micrometer, we calibrated some of our phones. Hopefully in the coming posts, you will get more details of the dimensions of the objects we observe. I am planning to teach them to use ImageJ for computation. If you have any recommendations for good softwares for the same, please enlighten us. We  learnt to use a microtome and blade to make sections. We also played with a few stains. Also in this batch were a set of new micronauts who assembled their foldscope and took their first baby steps in observing. With spring around the corner, we are gearing up for months of observing ahead of us.

Laks Iyer

This collage contains various pictures, including pollen, trichomes and stained substances.

Trichomes are featured in the first row, first picture and third picture, as well as the middle picture. These were taken by Nina Raghavan , who also captured those wonderfully clear pollen particles in the first row.

“One of the most recent things I discovered with my foldscope was the trichome The trichome is a little bump in the edges of a leaf. I examined many different leaves looking for trichomes, and I made a shocking discovery, that not every leaf has the same shape of tricones. On each leaf, the trichome is different, trichomes come in many different shapes and sizes. On some leaves tricones are pointy, while others are round . While looking for trichomes,I also found some pollen. The pollen leaves a trail of yellow powder or substance to it, and I often found the pollen in clumps.”

– Nina Raghavan

Kartik Krishnan was responsible for the stained onion cell in the second row, first picture.

Nataraj and Yash Shivaprasad looked at some leaves and practiced their staining technique.

(last row first picture) “