We had a really interesting time building microscopes and trying different lighting, slide preparation, and dyeing (with beet juice) and I wanted to share some of the photos we got from our different #communitymicroscope builds (see https://publiclab.org/micro for more on this kit):

This is from tile grout; not full resolution of the webcam but pretty good:

Here's the micrometer for scale:

Then we added a 40x microscope lens to try for better magnification; each tick mark is 10 microns, or 0.01mm:

Above is a nice sharp-edged piece, at ~50 microns or so.

Above, some interesting grooves and darker colors in there. This is in beet juice to add contrast but maybe that was unnecessary.

Finally, there were a lot of these smaller very sharp shards, at ~20x5 microns, perhaps:

And from last week's #microbrews event:

A poppy seed:

I'll post more in a bit!