Pollen Animation

If you've ever wondered about pollen, here's a good one for you. I found this interesting feature while examining a small grass flower in a Scanning Electron Microscope. Click on this link to see the animation. The pollen is sitting on the inside of the petal and as the image rotates, the object that comes in from the top-left and eventually covers up the pollen is the top side of the petal. I apologize if this takes a while to load on your computer. It is a rather large image file. I found that Firefox displays it smoother than Safari.
To produce the animation entailed taking 61 different images with the microscope. After taking each image, I tilted the sample 1 degree in the Z directions and reoriented in the X and Y directions in order to bring the area of interest back to the center. Then, additional focusing a stigmation correction was required in order to keep the image looking sharp. Once all off the data had been collected, the images were adjusted for brightness and contrast with Photoshop and the .gif was made with Image Ready.
These images were taken on a Hitachi 2700 SEM in the Madison Area Technical College Electron Microscopy Lab. The image on the right was colorized in Photoshop.