1. What is Micrographia iterum?

Micrographia was a book published in 1665. It was written by Robert Hooke, an experimental scientist, and described the images that he saw through a microscope.

Iterum is a latin word meaning "once again or anew".

Micrographia iterum is, more or less, a new collection of things seen through a microscope or another Micrographia.

2. Why bother taking pictures of things through a microscope? Hasn't that already been done? With better results?

Well, sure. You can even purchase a toy microscope for $99 that will allow you to take pictures and movies at a variety of magnifications.

However, this site is an attempt to push cheap equipment farther than it was meant to go, just for the fun of it. It's about using materials at hand to do things that they weren't meant to do. It's about invention. Here, let me explain:

One of the current web crazes is taking pictures with low resolution digital cameras. People use inexpensive digital cameras (the PenCam 2 is very popular) to take pictures, and then post them in galleries (example: pencam.org). In doing so, they demonstrate that you can take pretty amazing pictures with a fairly limited camera. That's neat. But you've only proven that a camera meant for taking pictures of your surroundings is capable of taking pictures of your surroundings. I mean, it's interesting, but it doesn't push the envelope too much.

I have a PenCam 2 and use it to take pictures of things (which I occasionally post on my weblog).

I also have a inexpensive microscope, called a GeoScope, that magnifies objects about 30 times. While listening to someone talk about how things can be analyzed either on a macro or a micro level, I was suddenly curious about whether the PenCam could be used to take pictures through the microscope. Guess what? It can.

So what we've discovered is that you can use a cheap digital camera and a cheap microscope together to do the sort of things that those wacky seventeenth century scientists were doing. The camera wasn't meant for taking pictures through a microscope, and the microscope wasn't meant to be hooked up to a computer. But they can be. Yes, indeed.

3. I'm still having trouble here. What is this fasciniation with taking low resolution pictures through a cheap microscope?

Here's something really interesting: Robert Hooke's microscope had about the same magnification as the GeoScope (25-30X). In addition, Hooke's microscope was plagued by the same sorts of problems that the GeoScope is plagued by: dark, low quality images. If that doesn't put the iterum in Micrographia iterum, then I don't know what does.

One more thing: Robert Hooke worked on Micrographia while still in his twenties. Me? I'm 24.

4. By which process do you take these pictures?

After deciding what to photograph, I place the specimen on the desk next to my computer. I connect the PenCam to the computer's USB port, and set it to video mode. I then place the camera lens over the GeoScope eyepiece. I then use the video output on the computer monitor to align the camera lens and the eyepice properly. This is fairly difficult since the camera must be balanced precisely on the microscope, and the microscope is focused by the angle at which it is balanced above the specimen.

Once the steps above have been accomplished, I switch the camera back to still photograph mode. I then change the camera mode to allow me to take continuous still photographs, and proceed to take 26 640 x 480 pixel pictures while moving the microscope back and forth slightly (this allows me to capture the highest quality image).

I select the best image out of the 26. The image is filtered using MediaChance's HotPixels Eliminator in order to remove blue noise. The circular image is then cut out of the rectangular background and pasted onto an entirely black background. The whole image is then reduced to 46% of the original size and saved as either a GIF or a JPEG, depending on the number of colors in the image.

5. May I use these images?

As long as you are going to use these images for a nonprofit purpose, I have no problem with you borrowing them as long as you give credit where credit is due. I'd prefer if you told me that you were going to use them (you can send me an email from the form on my weblog, so you don't even have to load your own email program). If you are an educator and you'd like to see pictures of something specific, let me know.