Research is so fun! (... when it works ;) at least I am very happy right now, but I guess this honeymoon phase won't last forever.) On Tuesday we've installed a new camera we bought for particle tracking and aligned it. Now matter if you've taken an optics class or not, the alignment of a beam and lenses is something experimentally challenging (this translates as "annoying and rather difficult" in real life). But once that works, it's great to observe something on a screen you projected on paper beforehand.
As it turned out, our small added camera path might be nicely aligned, but the microscope isn't, i.e. if an object is drifting up or down, it goes left or right on the screen. That's absolutely unwanted and scary. We'll do microscope alignment at some point, but right now we're only interested in 2d data, so we don't care much about the aberration.
With the new camera, we are going to look at beads in a dynamic network, which is made of microtubules. So far, the network exists in different, but semi-static cases and we have to find its dynamics. I started taking small movies of our network with a confocal microscope, but the network only grows and then it stops changing. We'll play around with its chemistry and see what we can do. Fortunately, we have some microtubule experts on campus so I'm sure we'll find a solution.
But making your own sample in the lab and then seeing it under a microscope is a great feeling! It's what you made. Or installing a camera and it finally works!
