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Found some bacteria growing, so I decided to check it out under the microscope! It was a bit hard to focus because I was looking at petri-plate-like “slides” rather than actual microscope slides. There was lots of little dot-shaped bacteria but also some crystal and branch shapes that I thought were really cool. My DIY polarization method gave me some cool pictures, but I’m surprised that the background turned out like this with multiple colors. Typically, when I use the two polarization films for my DIY method, the background is black, and then the specimen is whitish and very light. According to several websites, these colors might be due to the bacteria acting as biofringent materials so that when polarized light passes through, the light gets split into two different rays that interfere with each other to create colors (my next rabbit hole!).

I’m curious about checking out crystallization with sugar and salt under the microscope with the polarization films too! Maybe soy sauce?