Imaging the micrometeorites

Once I have found a micrometeorite I'll set it aside on a slide that has a piece of sticky paper similar to a post-it note (a helpful tip I learned from Jon Larsen). The adhesive is just sticky enough to hold the mm but not sticky enough to leave carbon residue on the MM itself. I use a decent but not too expensive microscope that I purchased online, it has a third port that I can connect my Nikon camera to with an adapter. Lighting is important so I purchased a bright strip of led lights and I filter them with a strip of light diffusion paper/film. Some people will even use a ping-pong ball to diffuse the light but I find the paper/film works best. This helps with imaging because it scatters the concentrated light which helps reduce the amount of reflection captured in your images. I start taking photos at the furthest focal length of the micrometeorite, and then I take additional images adjusting the focal length in as small of increments as I can. The end goal is to have 40-50 individual photos that are focused on the micrometeorite on different locations until the whole micrometeorite has been covered. I take those images and use a program called HeliconFocus to stitch them all together, the program does all the hard work and the end result should be a recognizable image of your whole micrometeorite. I then use another program called Alien Skin Exposure to adjust the exposure and to give the image a little more clarity, this step helps a lot. You can stop there but with the photos I enjoy I will also add the blue background you see in the photos on this site. And there you have it, a beautiful image of your itsy bitsy micrometeorite.