Definitely more fun than paying bills. Found 1 microscope so far, an old Tasco, hobbyist level, got it at yard sale for $2 a couple of years ago. For the purpose it seems to work good enough. Of course the slides are all gone. Found a quick substitute, those little clear plastic separators that are used in the nut, bolt, nail, misc hardware, parts storage drawers. Used a 2 inch by 3 inch, why make things hard. Easy to transfer the street finds.
I might get up on the roof and check the gutters as the street is loaded with plenty of metal from vehicles. There also appear to be beat up looking rods studded with crystaline shaped facets. Probably a bunch of magnetic debris held together by road tar.
The lighting seems to work best by shinning a flash light from above the plastic slide as the mirror light only yields an outline. Its easy to move the light around that way.
The lower magnifications work best for 2 reasons. Probably too much depth for the higher magnifications for this type of microscope. A geology microscope (one for $99 on ebay, probably the toy model, the rest in the hundreds and up) would probably make things a lot easier but they don't have those at yard sales, but with the downsizing and people quitting their day jobs, who knows what will turn up for sale.
I'm currently looking for a good old fashioned router for my artwork, something solid, no plastic. The Tasco microscope is all metal. The box is nice looking wood with dovetail joints probably displayed. The metal label is screwed in place with tiny screws, it was probably a toy as it just says high quality microscope.
The second reason is that the lower mag lenses don't allow the bottom of the lens to be driven all the way down into the slide.
There are around 10 tiny micro meteorites landing on every square meter of Earth every year. 14 tons every day, 5,200 tons every year. Ten percent of the dust in the polar ice is meteorite dust, the wind blows away the lighter earth sourced stuff.
One interesting thought is that the meteorite dust might be a source of food for life on places like Mars. Might even be feeding metal munching microbes on Earth with exotic food preferences. The fake stuff with all the road debris is either a delicacy or an insult. The oceans have so much of the meteorite dust in them that it was very easy to find back in the 1870s and was originally thought to be dripping off of large meteorites as they entered the atmosphere.
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