Labor Day weekend

Howdy all!  Hope you had a good holiday weekend!

As you know, I recieved my digital microscope and an assortment of loupes this past weekend.  Stacy and I definately put them to good use!  Here are some pics of what we got.

Digital Microscope

This is a USB digital microscope with 7 LED lights.  We are plugging it into my laptop and viewing some pretty interesting details on the samples collected.  We learned a few tricks as to the operation this weekend.  First, the White Balance was way off, so we had to adjust that.  Second, it was saving images directly to the program (unknown location), and I had to set the directory to be able to find the pics easier (lost about 100 images in a crash).

Field Scope with LED

Handy little field scope.  This has multiple zoom and focal ranges as well as a built in LED light/  No more holding the loupe and flashlight for me!  Should make field surveys a bit easier and one less thing to carry.

Mini LED Scope

This thing is TINY!  It looks it in the picture, and is in real life.  It is a small field scope with LED light.  It functions like an old school elementary microscope with a sliding focus and magnification tube.  Handy for quick peeks, but too fragile for the field!

30x Loupe with LED light

30x magnification jeweler's loupe with LED light.  Was purchased for home study of samples.  Takes the hassel out of holding the loupe and the LED flashlight at the same time.  It is nice and light, and has better magnification than the first one we bought.











I also recieved a great book from Amazon as well.  Maryland's Geology by Martin F. Schmidt JR  It is very informative and a wonderful resource to have if you live in or around MD.

Sorry for the lack of pics from the samples, but the learning curve taught me two very important lessons this weekend.

1 - Save the images to a specific file for ease of recovery.  This would have really helped with the crash.  The program dumped the 100 images I had taken prior to the crash.

2 - Back up new images to a thimb drive so I can bring them with me to MD!

I will post some nice close up pics very soon though.