Maple Bud, Magnified 10 times

This is a tiny portion of a maple tree bud opening this spring. The color, transparency, and stark details were a revelation to me.

A few future leaves within a maple bud.

I recently acquired a 10x microscope objective. Using skills that I had developed over many months of practice a few years ago, I put it to the test today with, among other things, a bud from a red maple. This is really just a tiny portion of the bud; the magnification is so strong that I couldn’t image the entire bud. This is maybe 5% of it.

I don’t know for sure, but perhaps what looks like cells on the immature leaves really are cells.

But what really excited me is the color and the combination of some hard, even rough surfaces and the glowing, transparent orange lump at top left. Yes, this is the kind of image one would take for science, but I like it as art.

I don’t know (yet) what all this is, but it’s very exciting to be able to take such images with this objective.

I took about 85 images; the depth of field is very narrow with a 10x microscope objective. I had to move in 15-micron steps to keep focus slightly overlapped from one image to the next. Here’s a single image, showing how tiny a portion was actually in focus in any one image:

Here is an iPhone photo of the hardware I use to capture the images:

From left to right: alligator clip to hold the subject; microscope objective; tubes to provide spacing between the objective and a special “tube lens” that provides the image to the camera at right. The field of view is about 2.4mm x 3.6mm.

I spent the first day tuning the spacing between the elements of the microscope, and today I got to have some fun with it.