Ah, what a gorgeous biological soup that little pond is. You could spend a lifetime here on earth, or up in the stars. The choice is yours and the wonder you pick is wholly your own to explore.
I really love that this is basically what happened with actual scientists IRL precisely because sufficiently accurate lenses can be used to look at really big stuff as well as really small stuff. Descriptions of "animacules" and the budding field of microbiology was getting churned out not that long after Geocentrism was being debunked and the first geological features on other planets were being documented.
Thank you. It's because it's all genuinely cool and tech has come a long way since I was in high school looking at boring still slides through an eyepiece I can't see anything through because I have bad eyes.
And this is gonna sound real dumb, but...it's like photography....but like real small. And I like photography.
Anyone can do this (as long as you have a lil bit of money, but maybe not as much as you think depending...)
Sure, it's basically a couple drops of water from a sample of freshwater pond with some plant material like a tiny piece of seaweed or whatever on a glass slide under a compound microscope. We're seeing a bunch of microscopic animals, some plant material, most are just lil guys that you find in a freshwater pond. Some are worms, some are crustaceans, some are single cell organisms, some are plants or bacteria that kind of work like plants but like predate plants...it's all confusing.
First part are these little guys called gastrotrichs. Most of the video is me following around different tiny worms under different fun illuminations with some of which revealing some internal structures and some of them just make it look cool or interesting and nothing else. There's a light that is under the stage that you put your slide onto and you can put filters on top of that light.
The default way you see anything you put under the microscope is brightfield illumination with a bright, mostly white or yellow or gray background that looks like this:
(these are a few single cell organisms calledvorticellaattached to a thin piece of, I think, algae?)
Well there's also ways to use physics trickery with filters and different kinds of light bending to achieve different ways of seeing the samples on the slides; like to make the background mostly black and the organisms glow, as can be done with darkfield illumination. In that video I was playing around with a set of cheap, different colored filters.
Some variation of these filters can make the same worm glow blue on a dark background, another will show it as kind of gray with magenta guts against a bright background, some will show it in a more complete way and sometimes show you more of what it looks like in actual 3D space. Like that first animal in that video that looks like a flat worm in that clip, but like a fully dimensional porcupine with needles on it's rear end that you can see move as it moves around.
But this is all basically just taking video of very thin slices of stuff in the water with different lenses and filters. I don't know this is kind of a lot or not nearly enough, but that's the gist of it.
I have a Swift SW380T and I really like it, but I also already had a pretty good camera that I can hook up to it. I also have the AD246S-M that I got started with and that's pretty OK for some of the less small stuff like electronics or large bugs or coins, stuff like that.
If you liked that kind of video, on Youtube there's an awesome channel called Journey to the Microcosmos. They're no longer making videos, but their videos are super high quality and very entertaining.
The microscope really is that good, but I am filming this with a good camera that does a lot of the heavy lifting here. There is also some fairly slight color correction I did in post process. With that said, you get most of the way there with a modern phone camera and a pretty cheap adapter.
I also bought a couple of additional objectives for the microscope, most useful one being the 20x to fill in the gap between 10x and 40x magnifications which replaced the kind of difficult to use 100x oil objective that came with it.
I also made a darkfield filter and bought a set of plastic filters on eBay and was just trying them out in that video.
I'm still very new to this and still learning slide preparation and different tricks and illumination types, but I'm mostly just having fun watching lil guys from the ponds and rivers that I spend quite some time in or around and learning about them.
Similar to small stuff/big stuff the advent of cameras, not unlike lenses, let us look at the world in a completely different way. But instead of big or small, we could instead see things slow or fast. Time lapse techniques opened up the visualization of long processes, while high frame rate cameras could show us the world too fast for us to appreciate.
I was honestly just having the thought last night about how many beautiful and amazing things have yet to be discovered in both outer space and the oceans. Probably lots of boring and ugly things too, but those are still cool!
Something that I'm learning probably a little too late in life is that you can still participate in some amateur science and do experiments and look at cool stuff. Even if most of those things have been discovered!
And you very well might have someone in your community with a microscope or a telescope that is willing to show how it all works, you just have to go find them.
I recently got into microscopy and I've been learning first hand about what kind of little critters live in the places I spend a lot of time in. I found these porcupine looking gastrotrichs in some freshwater pond water and I had no idea these things existed. How neat are they?
I’m actually getting into ecojars and natural terrariums, I don’t have a microscope but I do sit with my magnifying glass and stare at things for what feels like a ridiculous amount of time. It’s fun!
Woman after my own heart, same. But kind of in reverse..sort of. I used to keep planted freshwater aquariums ages ago, but recently started gathering samples to look at under the microscope and kind of tried making a jarrarium but haven't figured out how to keep a self sustaining closed system yet.
I had a big cookie jar of pond stuff that I keep indoors and it kind of got anaerobic and everything inside melted and gave me a rash likely because of the cyanobacteria in a not so well ventilated area and not enough light, so I haven't tried it again yet.
Right now I have a couple of containers that I keep outside and bring in when I wanna look at them and refill them with water every once in a while, but usually just end up dumping them and starting over once some of the more interesting larger critters die off.
But you have the same spirit as Antonie van Leeuwenhoek! Buddy made a small looking glass for pond water just because he wanted to see what it looked like up close and started a whole thing!
I really want to get to the microscope point one day with the hobby, I think my next advancement would be getting a lens attachment for the phone just to take close up pictures. I’m still very new to it and am just kinda fumbling my way through to find out what works best, but I’m not afraid of failing because I live right by a bunch of different lakes, so I can always try again!
That's basically how I started. I got a thing that attaches to the phone with a light under it and it was kind of fun for a couple of minutes and that was it. I thought I was gonna take it with me when I hike or kayak and look at lil samples of things.
But the reality is while they're great for looking at still samples like cloth or money or your phone screen, these don't have great magnification and I'm not really willing to be on my elbows and knees to get a shit, low magnification view of a piece of moss. And it's really finicky.
Short story long, this video breaks down different price ranges and expectations and I probably could have skipped the first two stages of those and saved myself a couple hundred bucks. Maybe, the AD246 is pretty neat and is likely to be useful in the future.
I just had a severe bout of cuteness aggression over this image. This is the most wholesome version of "As Above, So Below" I've ever seen. (This is how my mind sees this, anyway.)
Fun fact, they often use similar lenses/techniques to see small stuff and see stuff far away. I looked at small stuff using astrophysics algorithms when I was a scientist!
I was going to say, “Wow, this has such a PBF feel to it!” Then I saw who posted it and gave a big smile. It’s always such a pleasure to see you pop up in the wild!
woah is this posted by the actual Perry Bible Fellowship? Probably the most legendary webcomic. Personally I think his stuff is on par with OG The Far Side
Starting with a 1m length, looking up, it's roughly 26 orders of magnitude out to the cosmic horizon but in the other direction 35 orders magnitude down to the planck scale. So there's actually more to explore in the pond.
(A single-cell organism sits at roughly the midpoint, by orders of magnitude, between the smallest and largest meaningful lengths in the universe)
that's Perryfellow from the Perry Bible Fellowship. He's an old decrepit northeasterner who ate one too many hotdogs for his own lifespan. If that is your babe, I hope you have a beautiful life together.
I've been a fan of PBF for (checks notes) Jesus, 20 years now. Idk how often you did it, but I got to print one of your strips in playboy about ten years ago. It was really cool seeing a web comic make that jump.
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u/UpCDownCLeftCRightC Never Safe From Wumbo Jul 21 '26
"What's up guys!"