Archive for February 3rd, 2011

Blizzard of 2011

Thursday, February 3rd, 2011

posted by: rquardok

These snowflakes aren’t actually from the blizzard. I’m planning on capturing a few more when I go home today. I tried to capture some during the blizzard but my sliding door was frozen shut (and it was too much of a hassle to carry my supplies down the hall and out the front door).

I took a few images of the snowflakes I captured with the digiscope (a digital microscope that plugs into the USB port of a computer).  We gave digiscopes to each of the K-12 Teachers that attended one of our NANO Summer Institutes.  

I took these snowflakes to Northridge MS with me last week and the students had a chance to look at them with the digiscope. 
Enjoy! :)  

I also took an image of my blue jeans.

and a lego. :)

We use the digiscope as part of NANOweek. We talk about optics and magnifying images using light, and then we talk about how the SEM uses a beam of electrons to “see” objects. We then move into how the AFM and STM “feel” the surface and send data to a computer. The computer then assigns a color to each of the data points and creates an image of the topography of the surface.

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Six Exo-Planet Worlds for Kepler 11

Thursday, February 3rd, 2011

posted by: krueff

APOD: 2011 February 3 – Six Worlds for Kepler 11.

They’ve discovered over 2,000 candidate exo-solar planets!  WOW!  And that’s just a TINY fraction of the whole sky!

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