#microscopes

HAUUGHRHGHH ANALYZING THE MICROSCOPE MAN

I look at him and I see that they did a decent job with his design because there are the parts that actually correspond to a real microscope. And I work with microscopes, I know the basic anatomy of one.

On his forearms are two smaller dials, and these would generally correspond to moving your microscope slide up and down + left and right, respectively.

Over his shoulder is the scope, which is.. the scope we look through. On top is another dial, maybe for lens focus?

Thing on his chassis might be the stage itself (the place where you put the sample you wanna look at).

His limbs and frame do resemble, somewhat, the actual frame of an actual microscope.

There are, of course, parts I can't find, such as the light itself and light adjustment dial, the two (or one, depending!) dials for moving the stage up and down, etc, but he does look like a microscope.

..I'm normal about Percy, I swear.

This is the new microscope we just had set up in the Badlands Dinosaur Museum fossil preparation lab 🔬

This week Paleontologist Mike Eklund arrived to deliver and assemble a "super-microscope" of his own design. This is a marriage of several different makes, models, and eras of surgical boom stereomicroscope components. The resulting combination yields the best possible solution for conducting detailed fossil preparation and preserved soft tissue detection on such a colossal specimen. This is one of just a few units of its kind that have ever been produced.

The body of the scope is a Zeiss. The head of the microscope is a Leica MZ12 that magnifies up to 100x and provides a long working distance for the ergonomic sake of the technicians. (For reference, most microscopes you see in fossil preparation labs don't even magnify up to 40x.) The eyepieces add additional magnification, and there are ergo-wedges that allow for the angling of the eyepieces to prevent strain on the technicians' neck and back.

It's been custom fitted with lighting fixtures on both sides of the main head. This is because the higher the magnification, the less light is let into the lens, like a camera.

A camera attachment is hooked up to the viewing port that streams directly to the monitor attached to the arm. This lets us stream what's under the microscope directly to the gallery by this fall/winter.

Mary Ward – Scientist of the Day

Mary Ward, an Irish microscopist, popular science writer, and illustrator, was born Apr. 27, 1827, at the family estate, Castle Ward, County Down.

1. Microscope

2. Zebra teacup

3. Llama mug

4. Hanukkah crocs (might've submitted before but I wasn't sure)