Austin's Imaging Blog

Category: Uncategorized

  • Is there anything cooler than drilling gigantic holes in the ground? Yes – Blowing stuff up afterwards!!!

    I’m sure this study involved no fun whatsoever šŸ™‚ http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v518/n7537/full/nature14146.html -Austin  

  • Wide-field, high-resolution Fourier ptychographic microscopy end runs conventional limits to resolution

    Dane Maxfield from Technical Instruments send me this interesting article from Nature. It’s great to see the power of image processing be used in such a way, and my guess is that this type of image+software+hardware combination will yield excellent new technologies in the future. -Austin  

  • Nikon Immersion Oil Comparison

    Sam Lord at EveryDay Scientist has an excellent review of the available immersion oils for microscopy. Check it out here! -Austin  

  • Into the Wild….

    I’ve had an actual “job” since I was 15. Of course, my first work was mowing lawns as a kid, moving firewood, cleaning up rental houses, the usual “make a few bucks” stuff. When I was 15 I had a chance to become a beta tester for a book called something like “Windows 3.1 for…

  • The TriggerScope Controller

    I’m happy to announce a new product for microscopy, the “TriggerScope” controller system. I hope this device will prove itself useful in many areas of microscopy, but the basic idea is that it can drive scope components via manual control, TTL triggering, or PC control. Let’s say you have a laser and want to drive…

  • Voltage Dividers

    Happy New Year! I’ve been experimenting with a simple way of pulling a single power source into two rails, ad the simple solution is to use a voltage divider. One of the best explanations I’ve found on how these work is this excellent tutorial from SparkFun . Austin  

  • Adobe Brackets is a nice, free text editor

    I recently was working on some file transfers using filezilla, when I needed to edit a php file. Filezilla has a “view/edit” option, so I clicked it figuring, “ah, this likely won’t work, but I’ll give it a try”. To my surprize, it launched a really nice text editor, which after some research turns out…

  • NA vs. magnification, or why a 60x objective is brighter than a 100x

    NA vs. magnification, or why a 60x objective is brighter than a 100x

    Microscope objectives are typically classified as being brighter or darker based on NA, or Numerical Aperture. This is for good reason, as the NA of a lens will affect both the amount of light delivered to a specimen (excitation) and the amount of light collected from a specimen (emission). In addition to this, NA increases…

  • More on CMOS Rolling Shutter

    A friend sent me an awesomeĀ andĀ interesting article on petapixel with some excellent examples of how rolling shutters work on cmos cameras. (Thanks Hoy!) This is directly applicable to scientific CMOS cameras, IF you are using the “rolling shutter” method of capture. To make sure you capture an entire field of view in one single snap,…

  • Useful tools (and where to get them)

    PopMech has a little blurb on good cheap useful tools hereĀ  But I’d add that the best place to find such tools is Harbor Freight. Now don’t get me wrong, I’ve found items like cutting tools, abrasive pads and the like to be of marginal quality, but for a lot of tools, you can’t beat…