Competition winners get a closer look
Thursday, 02 September 2010
Left - Professor Geoff Mitchell with Nick and Catryn Masterton and microscopist Dr Laura Felisari. Right - magnified image of the head of a moth.
'It's been very interesting to see how the microscope works and the detail on the images.'
The winners of a competition to identify images that had been magnified up to a 100 times visited the University this week to see how it's done.
Catryn Masterton and son Nick, from Earley, entered the Reading Post quiz which asked readers to indentify photographs of everyday objects taken by a scanning electron microscope at the Centre for Advanced Microscopy (CfAM) at the University.
The couple were given a tour of the centre and then had objects they had brought in scanned - a feather, moth, mushroom, flower and some mouldy bread.
Catryn said: "We spent all weekend looking at the images in the newspaper trying to work what they were; it was quite hard! It's been very interesting to see how the microscope works and the detail on the images."
The microscope works by repeatedly firing thousands of electrons over the surface of the sample and the signal scattered by the surface structure is detected and organised to provide the image. A scanning electron microscope is able to magnify objects as small as nanoparticles (1,000 times smaller than the width of a human hair) to make them visible to the viewer.
Professor Geoff Mitchell, CfAM Director, said: "It was a pleasure to show Catryn and Nick round and explain the work we do here at the University. Our motto is ‘looking at things differently' and I think the images we took of the objects Catryn and Nick brought in certainly prove that."