Scope for Improvement

I decided to go ahead and get a useful bit of plastic that would hold my phone against optics, using either the microscope or telescope. I decided to spend a few extra quid and get this model which had an adjustable ring to ensure a concentric fit to the eyepiece (though the camera positioning to the 'aperture' is still a manual by-eye affair):

I was keen to give it a quick test today on both fronts. First-up I tried it on the telescope in possibly the worst test conditions - blustery, dull and light showers. Nothing much on the res but some distant Black-headed Gulls were suitable to try it out. These really were quite far off, but zooming the phone camera through the vignette and grabbing a bit of vid shows the potential for nice still brighter days. I would never get close enough to anything this distant with my camera, and whilst the image quality is not exactly stunning it's good enough.

The advantage of gabbing a bit of vid is that I can easily grab a still shot on the phone afterwards ...

Award-winning, no. Serviceable record shot, absolutely.

I might even be inclined to go birding occasionally.

This evening I had a quick go with it on my microscope. More practice needed, and probably more lighting, but you get the gist.

I wanted to see if cropping an original x1 image was better than zooming through the vignette (camera was set to 1:1 aspect):

x1 image, no cropping

 

x1 image, cropped

 x2 image, cropped

Focussing is a bit hit and miss, as using the microscope will always be a very narrow field, though should be fine when trying to capture a particular feature rather than the whole animal. The phone camera has pretty much cleared the vignette at x2 anyway, so I'll work on using that for now.

Anyway enough of that nonsense. After the success with my indoor spider, and had another look at one that I'd collected from sieving at Huncote Embankment last week. I eventually worked out that it appeared to be Neriene clathrata.

Note the now-obligatory spider-wrangling spoon.

Another epigyne checked (but before the new phone adaptor), another record submitted and accepted, another spidery first for me.