Making a microscope with crap I found around the house (sciencepic)

So it's Sunday, the day where I barely do anything. Or was that Tuesday? ...

So it's another normal day and my delivery arrived from deep inside of China; my phone clip-on microscope with crappy zoom. For about $5, I got myself 30x zoom with my camera after digital zoom. So basically it was a bit better than just looking at things closely. My phone is a Chinese Huawei, too, so If you're reading this expecting something amazing, save yourself the disappointment and go read something else.

Well anyway, I wanted to experiment, so I started wondering what other lenses I had lying around.

After chuckling at my cat hobbling around with his new broken leg, I realized he wouldn't be needing the laser pen for at least a month or so, which I do declare has a little lens inside. At this point I was unsure if it was going to be of any use, but these things sell for about $2 so whatever, I took it apart.

It was quite tricky to get stuff out with nothing but a pair of pliers, and I had to push the lens out with a cotton bud, but I succeeded in the end. Next I needed to keep it steady attached to my phone camera. I found a christmas decoration clip thing.

It was too chunky though, so I found a hair clip thingy which fit the bill. I lost my tape so I had to use a plaster (band aid) to stick it to my phone.

With this tiny lens in place I could get some pretty close up but surprisingly low quality shots of stuff, so I wanted to try and double it up with the microscope thing I just received. With some struggle of positioning I got some lame-ass shots of a cotton bud.

You see, the microscope had plastic in the way meaning I couldn't get close enough for the double lens system to work, so I had to break apart the microscope too, and extract the big lens. I would no longer have the nifty light, but phones have lights anyway so whatever.

Now we were getting somewhere. Unhindered, I got some fairly cool shots of my hair, a mole, an old cat scratch a leaf and my pillow (I was doing this whole thing in bed)

Then I had a flashback of a time when I was telling my coworkers how the white background on their computer screen wasn't white at all, it was an illusion. I went on to explain that there is no yellow or orange or pink or white or even black on a monitor when turned on. They laughed and mocked me and made me feel dumb in the way normal people make flat earther's feel.

It's haunted me ever since because by the time I resorted to Google to prove it, they'd already dismissed me as claiming lemons aren't real and other whacko claims and moved on to something else. I shouldn't even have to Google shit but again, whatever.

But today I felt like demonstrating my point. We all (probably) understand that the screen is made up of LED lights of the colours Red, Green and Blue. So it stands to reason that other colours are just a mix of those, including black (just very dimly lit LEDs).

But I never managed to see it in action for myself, so here's what I found zooming into my computer screen with my cool little microscope set up. These to me are the coolest results of my afternoon (though putting my face up to the screen with the lens in front of my eye produced results 1,000 times cooler.

In this one you can see how the 'black' is just really dark RGB

So there you have it. Using crap around my apartment I managed to entertain myself for half a day. I'm going to stabilize the set up with some plexiglass and a microphone stand I have lying around and try to get some clearer shots in the future. Let me know if you have any suggestions of stuff to zoom in on (I've already played out the phallic jokes so no need to include them below).

Have a good week y'all!