I got a cheap microscope & tried it out on my melted hair last night. This should work for the demand dossier for the settlement conference.
Science friends: Is there anything I can use as a background that'll help show the details of the hair, especially where it turns white? Also what's the proper mounting? I tried wet & it was a mess.
@ashleygjovik can we get specifics of what kinda microscope your using? It also looks like maybe the hairs aren't on one plane. Are they on a flat or bubble slide?
@budsofstone All photos posted were taken of hairs on the base stand with no mounting, since I ruined most of them after trying to mount them and failed. Microscope is 50x-1000x, and built in camera is 2M pixel, 178 ° wide angle.
@ashleygjovik bright backlight is always important for microscopy you can use any bright led that fits under the viewing platform. I would flat mount in oil personally and use an oil immersion lens. If you are having trouble mounting you could dry mount in a bubble slide. That would be easiest I think, but the lowest resolution. If you are interested in oil immersion Wikipedia https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_immersion
Has a good article, you do need a special lens to do it, most lab grade scopes have one tho
@ashleygjovik I'm also curious how the hairs got destroyed in the mounting process?
@budsofstone Thank you! I'll look into all of this!
Oh, with the wet mount the slip cover kept falling off & then I lost the hair. With dry mount and nail polish, the most important parts kept getting stuck in the polish. The primary issue was that I was doing it sitting on the floor & my dog kept trying to be involved, so when I do it for real I'll need to get a higher up lab-like set up to reduce the curious puppy nose incidents.
@budsofstone They're little scientist doggos! 🐶 🔬
Thank you for the tip about the oil. I was messing around last night with just some olive oil & it was the best view thus far. I ordered some of the real stuff. Hurrah!