It won’t come as a surprise to anyone that, as a photographer, I have always been interested in any technology that allows us to see more, see better, and even see things that we can’t really see with our own eyes.

I love telescopes. What we saw with the Hubble Space Telescope was nothing short of amazing. Five years ago, we launched the James Webb Space Telescope, and what we saw coming from it left us searching for words beyond “amazing.” Now the Vera C. Rubin Observatory has just begun it’s astronomical survey of the southern sky, and I can’t wait to see and read about the results.

I don’t own an astronomical telescope, but I keep thinking about getting one. Maybe if I add one to my Amazon wish list, some generous stranger will buy it for me.

I do, on the other hand, own several microscopes. Like telescopes, microscopes allow us to see things our eyes can’t.

One such microscope was a gift from a fellow photographer, who came to visit and help me cover last week’s Stratford Peach Festival. It is a nice piece of hardware, though it doesn’t wear a label or include any instructions. so I don’t know a lot about it.

When I was a kid, I had a much smaller microscope, which was part of a kit. It was fun to play around with, but the pre-installed slides that came with the kit were sometimes hard to make out. What is this, sand? Leaves? Carpet fibers?

But one slide was always fun to view: silverberry scaly hair. I know that sounds a little bit disgusting, but it wasn’t. It was colorful and detailed and interesting. It was my go-to microscope slide when I was about eight years old.

It turns out that generations agree with me about this. Silverberry scaly hair has been in microscope kits for decades!

I would love to hear about your microscope or telescope stories, and please let me know what would be the next thing to view on this microscope.

Beyond that, my next project might be to figure out how to put a camera on this microscope, so I can share what I see with my readers. Your ideas about how to do this are very welcome.