Needle In A Haystack

Today was stinky. My lab journal reads 'argh!'. I came in at about 11:15 after my two classes and began trying to obtain an image of the fibre and beads with the camera.

It was not happening.

I started with the camera lens fitted thinking that I could catch the microscope image and focus it onto the CCD chip. I just got a lovely top-down view of my microscope set-up. Michael told me to take the lens off and work with the chip only. This proved slightly better because I could pick out the circular image from the objective only. But, I spent the next 4 hours trying to focus the image. That was also just not happening. Jonathan gave me another translation stage so I could move the glass slides precisely rather than coarsely move the objective. I won't go in to detail about how many configurations of camera, objective, slide and sample I used.

I got fed up at about 5pm and went to the shop to get chocolate and apple juice. By chance, I saw Sile and ran after her to ask her for some help. She went through in 20 minutes what I had spent the day doing and managed to focus an image of the many random blobs of water and god knows what on the slide. Extreme relief! I then finished my apple juice and chocolate and came home. I was seriously worried that my project had come to a dead end today. Thank god for PI's.