Phone-to Eyepiece Pictures

Microscope Pics

I've had mixed results using a new Celestron NexYZ phone-to-eyepiece holder on several devices. The best results came with the NexYZ attached to one of my binocular microscopes. My granddaughter, Sophie, likes to bring me dead bugs and other curious bits to examine together through the microscope. For example, here's a grasshopper leg.

We found a dead dragonfly during our recent trip to the NC shore. The facets on portions of its compound eye are visible in the next pictures, especially the second magnified one. (Click on the images for a better view.) The bright patches on the eyes are reflections from an overhead light source.

One of the dragonfly's legs looked different from the grasshopper leg above.

Sophie also found lots of crab parts on the beach. I never noticed how they were encrusted with sand until I looked at the magnified image. The sand grains are clear quartz, seen more clearly in the second image below.

Sophie also found a bird feather on the beach. The feather's tip looked like this.

While my phone was well attached to the microscope I decided to examine some fossils I've collected over the years. Some fossils only show up clearly under magnification. For example, this piece of limestone from near Lexington, VA looks almost blank to the unaided eye, but shows some shells and what I think is a portion of a Cryptolithus trilobite under magnification. The trilobite portion is the curved series of dots just to the left of the shell near the upper right edge.

I think Sophie might like seeing magnified microscope images on a phone screen rather than trying to match her small eye spacing to binocular eyepieces designed for adults.