DIY Gigapixel Microscopy

Craft & Design Robotics Science
DIY Gigapixel Microscopy

Explorable Microscopy is an open-source project from Carnegie Mellon University, working to develop software and hardware standards for the scientific application of ultra-high-resolution microscopic-scale digital panoramas of scientific specimens for preservation, forensics, and original research.

In the case of the photograph of the feather, we originally shot 8,000 photographs which took approximately 20 hours to acquire. Since the apparatus is automated, we only need to check the memory periodically and battery power during those 20 hours. The rest of the process for the feather took about 6-8 hours of labor, 18 hours of rendering time, and 8 hours of post-processing computations. This production time resulted in the feather image which has a resolution of over 6 gigapixels or 6,483 megapixels.

I got a chance to meet Gene Cooper and Rich Gibson (two of the project’s five major collaborators), together with helper Scott Van Note), at BAMF 2011, where they were showing off the prototype imaging robot shown here. It’s based on a small CNC milling platform from Probotix. More information is available on the Explorable Microscopy wiki.

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6 thoughts on “DIY Gigapixel Microscopy

  1. AndrewS says:

    it would have been better to maybe waste all of this energy taking a photo of something that you cant find lying about and look at in better detail.
    Next time try making a picture of something most people dont have access too/unable to see in such detail

    1. Sean Michael Ragan says:

       Well, they have, actually, taken many images of unusual specimens and unique artifacts for exactly that reason, so that people who don’t have access to them can examine them closely.   I chose the feather as an example image from among the many on their various website, and only because it was convenient for producing the blog image showing the zoom levels.  And I don’t really think it takes that much energy (just processing power and time) to produce these images.

  2. AndrewS says:

    it would have been better to maybe waste all of this energy taking a photo of something that you cant find lying about and look at in better detail.
    Next time try making a picture of something most people dont have access too/unable to see in such detail

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I am descended from 5,000 generations of tool-using primates. Also, I went to college and stuff. I am a long-time contributor to MAKE magazine and makezine.com. My work has also appeared in ReadyMade, c't – Magazin für Computertechnik, and The Wall Street Journal.

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