The Common Blue

As its name suggests this butterfly is found just about everywhere except mountainous regions of the country. I've seen plenty of them locally especially during July and August along the old canal bed  not too far from home. It's great to see the beautiful pale blue colour contrasted against the green of plants and foliage as in the photos I took below. The male is more blue than the female on the upper side of the wings but when settled on a flower with the wings upright and tight together they show the speckled brown underside of the wing.

Pretty though the blue is, the patterns under the wing are fascinating. I often wonder how such intricate patterns are formed with each butterfly a work of art in itself.

A detailed account of the Common Blue can be found on the UK Butterflies site.

The Common Blue feasting on a Great Willowherb flower.

The Common Blue magnified 10x showing the patterned underside of the wing..

A closer view x30.

x40

x40

x200

x40

x100

x30

Blue wing scales x40

Blue wing scales x100.

Blue wing scales x200.

Brown spots from the wing underside x40 resembling two closed eyes with black eyelashes.

Brown spot x200.

Wing scales x400 using the microscope light source through the wing.

Wing scales using the microscope light source at 1000x.

Common Blue eye x40.

The Proboscis 40x.

At 200x the individual facets of the eye are visible.

An Antenna magnified 60x.

Chicory

While out walking last summer in the fields near home, I came across several clusters of tall plants with blue flowers along the field edge. A sample of pollen taken from one flower proved to have an interesting 3D shape.

I tried to find them again this summer but because the path had become completely overgrown, I couldn't get to the location until the farmer mowed the edge of the field flat a few days ago. I retraced my steps from the year before and half way along the field I found some that had survived. I took a couple of flowers home and by the next day one had opened fully. It was perfect in its form and I photographed it close up.

The Chicory plants are on the left on the edge of a large field full of red and white clover

A single chicory flower deep in the undergrowth

A chicory flower photographed after it opened at home.

Magnified 10x with the stereomicroscope and backlt the beautiful colours are accentuated. Notice the blue and white stamen loaded with yellowish pollen.

Anthers and pollen magnified 30x

A single anther magnified 60x 

The compound microscope shows detail from a single stamen absolutely loaded with pollen

For some reason the pollen seems bluish here at 100x magnification

At 200x the curious multi-faceted structure becomes clear.

2 pollen grains magnified 400x showing the faceted structure and tiny spikes.

 If you want to see an amazing picture of this pollen under a Scanning Electron Microscope look here

Fractal Art 2 - Incendia

A few years ago I found another fractal art generator called Incendia  by Ramiro Pérez Clare Nash. Incendia is donationware ie it's free to use but you can make a donation to receive the full version which also has a snowflake generator.

It soon became a favourite of mine. I found it really good for sci fi type scenes because of its ability to build complex fractal structures from base shapes which can have a high tech or an organic appearance. There are around 45 different fractal types to start with and you can now build your own. The author describes the program as a "3D Multiprocessor Fractal Engine that allows you to explore the realm of the 3D fractals" and that's just what it does. Not only has he designed and built Incendia but he has produced some brilliant images from it. You can also create animations and if you want some fractal music for a soundtrack you can use it's sister program Aural to generate it.

WARNING: This program is highly addictive and can seriously damage your free time!

Here are some I made earlier:

Spacestation

3D Fractal

The Oceans of Europa

Fractal City

Dying World

City of Spheres

Dance of the Amoebae

Andromeda Outpost

Alien Craft

Dragon Eggs

Things you never knew you needed your IPad for...

I'm interested in polarised light photography. It can turn some everyday objects into something colourful and exciting... things like plastic tubes or plastic knives, forks and spoons. What I needed was some polarised film or sheets . A search on Ebay and Amazon confirmed my worst fears. It was going to be expensive. Then I saw an article in a photography magazine: You could use your Ipad , smartphone or computer monitor as a polarising filter. Most screens these days are polarised material (for cutting reflections maybe?). I already have a polarising filter for my DLSR camera  to reduce reflections in water and darken blue skies, so in theory I had everything I needed.

I downloaded a free Lightbox app for my IPad. This just gives you a bright white screen to simulate a lightbox which was used in the old days to view slides and film negatives. I setup the IPad so the screen was vertical and arranged some transparent plastic tubes and containers in front of it. I attached the polarising filter to the camera and adjusted it until cross polarisation with the IPad screen was achieved . At this point the screen looks dark when looking through the camera.

I've described the science in a previous post back in July: The other side of Vitamin C. Anyhow, plastic is one of those substances which responds to polarised light in quite a spectacular way. The transparent plastic tubes were transformed into a kaliedoscope of  bright colours which varied as the tubes were turned.

I added some extension tubes onto my 18-250mm lens to give larger magnifications and sprayed water droplets onto the plastic to create some interesting effects.

Why do we get different colours? Because plastic has the ability to turn the plane of polarization of an incoming beam of light. The degree to which the plane of polarization is turned depends on the color of the light and the stress or characteristic of the material at any given point.

 White light is made up of a whole range of different wavelengths which we perceive as different colours if you see an area tinted yellow, this is due to the fact that blue wavelengths that passed through the subject had their plane of polarization turned so that they are now perpendicular to that of the filter on the camera lens and thus blue is subtracted from the beam. If blue is removed then what we see is made up primarily of red and green and thus we perceive that area as yellow.

If we see a magenta area this means that the polarization direction of green light is now aligned at 90 degrees to the plane of polarization of the filter on the camera. What remains once green has been removed from a white beam is red and blue and this we perceive as magenta.