This episode of “Cool Stuff Under the Microscope” is focused on Silica Gel, which is a material used in air sampling to absorb chemicals which are later desorbed for analysis by specific analytical techniques. A piece of Silica was placed on a Microscope slide and analysed under the Radical microscope (More info here) with a Nikon D5300 Digital Camera being used to image the silica gel.

Because the depth of field is so shallow (talking microns), the following images are focus stacked from about 4 or so images through photoshop, and then finally edited in Lightroom. As always if there is anything (readily available) you are interested in looking at under the microscope let me know and I will see if I can add it to the list.