Boost your resistance

At the time of the Corona crisis, many people resort to remedies to increase resistance to disease, such as vitamin C and Multi vitamin tablets. These, in this case foam tablets, contain many other substances besides the vitamins. Although the subject ‘vitamin C’ has been used many times in microscopy, it is still fun to view the crystals of these substances under the polarization microscope.

So, no sooner said than done, the tablets are now up for grabs at home anyhow. Dissolve a tablet in water, filter the solution, heat a few droplets of the solution on an object glass over a spirit burner in order to saturate it by evaporation. Let it crystallize patiently, put a cover glass on it and move it under the microscope.

The procedure with the vitamin C tablet worked out fine, although crystallization was slow due to the presence of other chemicals in the foam tablet. In the case of the Multi vitamin tablet, crystallization was extremely slow and the crystals remained very fine. So a Motic Plan UC 100X oil immersion objective had to be used in order to get some body in the image.

What was abundantly harvested were air bubbles present in the preparation and they are really photogenic. At least that was something else. Judging by the resulting images, the new Moticam S6 camera lends itself perfectly for this purpose.

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