Exploring a sunflower with a cheap 60x-100x clip-on microscope
An inexpensive 60x-100x-magnification clip-on microscope like the one shown above can be a shed load of a lot of fun. Last Friday, I spent one of the shortest hours of my life (because
After snapping that picture with my phones naked camera, I attached the microscope, turned on its white-light LED (as opposed to its UV LED), and got started. I hadn’t read up on sunflower anatomy beforehand and poked around on a look-and-see basis, without a set plan.
The golden ray florets girdling the sunflower came first. I plucked one, laid it on a sheet of notepaper on my desktop and pressed the business end of the scope against it. Minute variations in the elevation of the plant material translated into variations in distance to the lens, yielding the blurry bits in this and subsequent photos.
Getting the “eyepiece” of the microscope properly aligned with one’s phone’s camera lens requires a few moments’ worth of fiddling. When you’ve got them lined up, your screen will show you a circular view of whatever you’re looking at, surrounded by darkness. For the preceding photo, I pinch-zoomed until my view of the yellow floret filled my phone’s screen.
The green bracts behind the yellow ray florets felt rough and velvety, evocative of a toned-down cat’s tongue. Looking at the edge of one of these leaf-like bits, here’s what I saw (partially pinch-zoomed):
Lots of projections, some longer and pointy and other shorter and stubby, as well as (at intervals) some brown knotty-looking features like the one visible in that photo. Next, I turned my little scope towards the sunflower’s disk and snapped some photos of what my layperson’s reading of this post on the UBC Biology 343 Blog suggests were stigmas of mature disk florets, two of which I’ve combined side-by-side:
Moving further inwards, I came to the immature disk florets that comprise the oily-black-looking center of the sunflower. This region was so alien-looking that it’s where I took the most photos. Here are just a handful of them, grouped together into two images:
Not bad at all for an instrument that, basically, is a kid’s toy and which cost less than USD $6.
At this point, I was basically out of time. There was other stuff to do, but I spent a few more minutes giving select parts of the sunflower a second look, through a slightly more brawny handheld USB microscope (claimed magnification of 200x-500x) that’s equipped with multiple LEDs (brighter photos) and which functions precisely like a USB web cam. Look for those photos in an upcoming post.