Art picked us out a microscope for our birthday present from his mom Mary last year (it took him a while to decide what to get and pick one out). It's really a quite nice one, solidly constructed, with magnification up to 100x. As with the telescope, it turns out you can hold the digital camera up to an eyepeice and take some pretty decent pictures. Here are some.

Citric acid crystals in a petri dish, lighted by polarizing the microscope light with two lenses from polarized sunglasses. 30x.

Again, polarized light on citric acid crystals, 30x.

Crystals in dried saliva. 60x

Sand from a river in the Catalinas, 60x. Art noticed there were a few nearly spherical crystal or glass balls in there, some fused together, as in this picture. Here's some more photos of them:

More shiny balls, 60x. We can't really figure out what these are: volcanic glass? Debris from blasting operations? Suggestions welcome!

Shiny balls with garnets from the river sand, 30x. Notice the garnet crystal center bottom, with quartz crystals embedded in it on either side, like a water molecule, or Mickey Mouse, or insect eyes.

Here's the garnets and balls at 15x, with a ruler.

Here's a seed shrimp or clam shrimp from some water from marshy ground south of Tucson. These guys really zoom around; this one held still while grazing. 60x

Here's a paramecium (upper left). Art had a hard time catching this guy on camera, because he really zoomed around. 100x.