Looking at dust

The photos here were taken with a real microscope, and with home-level gear, you may not see as much: it is still worth doing, because any dust collection will contain all sorts of surprises. With a good microscope, you may be able to identify a few pollen grains as well (and we will come back to pollen at some point, later on).

You will need sticky tape and a microscope slide. If you don’t have any glass microscope slides, pieces of the clear polystyrene cases that come with CDs will do just as well, and so will flat pieces of clear plastic chocolate boxes, but slides are better.

Look for dust under beds, on outside or inside windowsills, on floors and carpets, even sitting on the tops of books. For my example shots, I sampled my lounge room floor, my desk (which is rarely dusted), and a Venetian blind. 
 

Dust from my desk, seen through a monocular microscope at three magnifications.

You can collect dust from anywhere, by pressing a piece of sticky tape onto the dusty surface to collect a sample of the material you found there. Stick the tape down onto the slide, and you’re ready to look at the dust, but expect a few mysteries...
 

Above, you can see dust particles from my lounge room, taken with a real microscope. Floor dust may include fibres from clothes, food scraps, bits of tiny dead animals that have fallen apart, mineral grains, flakes of human skin and hair, fragments of paper, pollen grains and tiny bits of rotted leaves.

The dust may have been picked up by the wind and whirled around, mixed with fragments of food and soot particles. As you zoom in, so you begin to see new and enchanting details that were hidden at lower magnifications. You will only find what is hidden there if you search! Here is some dusty cobweb. 
 

When you look closely at things, any sign of order, any regular pattern like the helical strands of fine web or a series of branches usually means that a living thing is involved. Patterns like this are the sorts of signs a spacecraft, flying past a planet, would seek out, when they scan for extra-terrestrial life.

Computer monitor screens attract dust, as I noticed, one sunny winter Sunday morning. I used sticky tape to sample it, and then made an odd discovery: blue fibres! Below, are two shots at x40 to the left. The rightmost one is at x100. The curved thread across the middle was bright blue!

With a bit of experimentation, I discovered that the blue was a trick of the light, and that it came from slanting sunlight shining on the slide at an angle, because when I blocked the sunlight with my hand, the blue disappeared. I have a theory about what caused it, but I’m not sure, and I’m not saying!
Things to look out for in dust:
*  Flakes of skin or hair, food scraps;
*  Tiny dead mites or their fragments;
*  Mineral dust; threads from clothes;
*  Spider web, bits of plants: just keep looking!

But does ‘x40’ or ‘x100’ really mean what it says? Let’s look at the word ‘magnification’ more carefully.

That topic comes next. 

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