Comments on: The Teeny — I mean BIG — Picture

By: Winchell Chung

Winchell Chung — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 16:54:35 +0000

You said:

Actually, there are several pictures in that series that will haunt my dreams. There is something incredibly creepy about little teeny things seen through an electron microscope.

[shudder]

I am reminded of a quote from Sir Arthur C. Clarke:

Nowhere in space will we rest our eyes upon the familiar shapes of trees and plants, or any of the animals that share our world. Whatsoever life we meet will be as strange and alien as the nightmare creatures of the ocean abyss, or of the insect empire whose horrors are normally hidden from us by their microscopic scale.

By: Daniel

Daniel — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 16:15:45 +0000

I brought in Fleas from my dog to look at when I used the SEM.

By: Gary Ansorge

Gary Ansorge — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 15:33:35 +0000

IBY:
Yes, movie monsters. Just goes to show, we really have no imagination to compare with the random designs of nature,,,

Note the following monsters and where they were derived:
1) the Blob: A unicellular critter blown up to our size:
2) Alien: a really big wasp, with the same “laying their eggs in living tissue” aspect.
3) Them: Really big ants(impossible, due to their lack of lungs)
etc,etc,etc,,,

Blowing up small, seldom seen critters to macro-scopic size is a favorite SciFi technique. After all, the only life we know is what’s right here on earth, so they are the progenitors of all our monsters(well, except possibly for ghosts). Even vampires are just mammalian versions of mosquitoes, with a big bite(snark) of magic thrown in,,,

GAry 7

By: Santiago

Santiago — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 15:24:48 +0000

Heh, I’ve just come back from using an SEM (Scanning Electron Microscope) actually. They are indeed incredible machines. Not only can you see really, really tiny stuff (with a ginormous depth of field, to boot) you can literally point to, say, the eye of the ant there and ask “what elements is that made of, and in what proportion?” and a couple minutes later out comes the answer.

Also, not only are those little things amazing in their own right, I can guarantee that anything non-metal (including the snow flake and the lil critters) will actually be coated in Gold. Yeah, as in jewellery, Au, Gold. We’re talking nano-meter thick coatings, of course, but gold-plated all the same. If you want to know why, consider that an SEM is essentially bombarding a sample with electrons, and without a conductive path to ground, you could probably put the-mother-of-all-static-charges into your sample, not to mention mess up your imaging and the (extremely) expensive imaging equipment.

By: Jon

Jon — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 14:32:29 +0000

Wow! Check this one out.. It's Saturn's rings falling across Titan, with a little Enceladus in the mix.

By: Mikeb302000

Mikeb302000 — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 11:59:55 +0000

I love the Big Picture blog. I’ve been going there regularly since the Olympics.

By: Eddie

Eddie — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 11:51:12 +0000

Bad Astronomer,

Thanks for this link.

Some site that.

Eddie