Bonus Article - Your Compound Phone Microscope

A $15 way to see almost down to microbes with your smartphone

There was a small delay with the illustrator for the Logical Fallacy Parable article this week, and that article will be coming out one day late, on Monday. To make up for this delay, I am including a small bonus article on something really fun I did with my phone that you can do on any dewy morning.

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I have a Samsung Galaxy S10+ cell phone. One of the reasons I got that model was that it has a 2x lens on it, letting me take fun pictures with my phone that can get a little close up. Below is a picture that illustrates these capabilities:

It’s really nice, and nature macrophotography has become one of my hobbies.

But I wanted to see if I could get closer, without having to buy an expensive dedicated digital camera and lens set. So I found a macro lens embedded in a rubber band on Amazon, linked here. Note that this is not an affiliate link, and I don’t get anything for linking this convenient lens (shown below).

I just think it’s cool. How cool? Well, it allows me to take pictures like this abandoned wolf spider exoskeleton, which is only a quarter of an inch across:

Here is another shot I got of ants tending aphids on a grass flower:

But on dewy mornings, I am able to place this 10x macro lens over my 2x phone lens and get WAY better than 20x. I make a free space compound microscope using hydrophobic surfaces of plants and droplets of water.

First, find a plant in your yard that has tiny hairs that make water bead up on its leaves. Then find one that has a droplet trapped between at least two surfaces of the leaves. The hydrophobic surfaces make a small enough water droplet become almost perfectly spherical, making it a pretty good lens. This is what I found in my back yard:

Zooming in, once can see how good of a lens the water droplet appears to be:

And if you line it up just right, you can see parts of the leaf under the water droplet in pretty incredible detail.

The little dark spots on the leaf, by my estimation, are only about 10 millionths of a meter across (10 microns), which is the same size as some bacteria.

Now, of course this includes zooming in on the picture, but with typical digital photo sizes of 8-12MB, those are a lot of pixels. A lot of high-res digital zooming is possible, and as far as I am concerns, this counts.

This means that this compound microscope (my cell phone!) has an effective magnification on the order of 200x in this configuration.

I really enjoyed doing this work with water on a leaf as a lens.

And it reinforces my belief that we are surrounded by magic everywhere. You just have to stop zooming around, and zoom in.