The houseflies! - The fly on the left is dead. The fly on the right is alive. These are very small flies, here seen with the 10x magnification. The circular container has the diameter of a small thumbnail.
Using the 60x magnification - clearly highlights the horror within the smallest insect!
I hate flies: houseflies, mosquitos, fruit flies, horseflies, and nearly all other insects with two wings. On the other hand, I am more tolerant to four winged creatures, such as dragonfiles, which are quite common in the portuguese Summer, at least near rivers and lagoons. Nevertheless, if today I was to catch any insect, small enough to fit one of my transparent containers for samples, I would nail it alive and then do a zoomed video of the thing... using my Intel QX3 microscope, of course.
You can read my review of the QX3 on 080101, but what you need to know right now, is that it is a device that can zoom 10x, 60x and 200x, allowing you to capture the images on digital stills and digital movies. The problem is finding samples :).
I like to have control on the fauna that surrounds me... and I particularly dislike the company of insects. I also don't have a pro-active attitude on samples searching, so these pages with pictures of my QX3 adventures, will happen when - literally - something falls from the ceiling on my PC keyboard. Incredibly, that has already happened three times!
The first unexpected life form that landed on my keyboard, was a dead insect, the size of an ant, very much the shape of an ant... but with wings. This ant creature was my first QX3 "victim", and I will publish these first pictures one of these days. I don't publish such material right now, because it isn't as interesting as today's capture, which is a pair of houseflies, one of them *alive*.
Yes, I kind of tortured a living being - a housefly! It all began with two very small houseflies, suddenly flying against a window, there is on my computer room. I don't know where these flies came from, but since they can grow from small spots to annoying buzzers in less than 24 hours, that possibilities were endless.
However, I simply couldn't tolerate such an invasion, so I departed with a killing mind, until a blue glimpse of my USB microscope stopped me on time...
Seconds later, with nothing but a transparent samples container, I managed to capture the two flies - one died on the fight; the other didn't suffer a scratch. Living insects are the best samples you can get for the QX3, because they'll look great on video!
So, this QX3 Exhibit #01 is about houseflies. This is a very curious thing to happen, because my first Mavica Exhibit also was about a fly...
Click here to go to the my main Intel QX3 microscope page, or just click here to jump directly to today's exhibit.
I selected eight (8) pictures and one (1) video. Most of the pictures are taken with a magnification of 60x, but there are some of 200x. It is pretty obvious which lens I was using for each photo... believe me.
I don't know if you've ever seen an insect with a microscope. I've been doing it since before a teenager, and I found them such horrible monsters, that I needed to quit "the job" for all these years, until today. Yuck! Insects are really ugly! You've been warned...
In order to watch the video, you'll need to have Microsoft's MPEG4 codec installed on your machine (you usually do have it). If you don't, just try to play the file with Windows Media Player, that it will ask you to connect to the Internet and download the proper file.
All the files are available from this exhibit's page, with detailed instructions on how to see and download them.
Using the 200x magnification - is a hard thing to do with the QX3. The focus is manual and the are covered by the lens is really small, making it hard to place the sample where it matters. Now imagine when the sample is a living being...
200x, again - and here it is another nasty vision of those flying things that sometimes land on food.