August 27, 2022

Chlorargyrite from Tombstone, Arizona

A specimen from the upper levels of the Goodenough Mine.
This is my specimen TT-21-4, an actual micromount from my collection.

I used the MPE-65 set at 3x and f/4. I set exposure to manual and 1/15 of a second.

Lighting is a single Jansjo lamp with no diffuser. I left my flurorscent room lights on during the shoot because I am lazy. I set my color balance to 3600K as a wild guess.

I am using a 50 micron (0.050 mm) step size, which is 60 motor steps for my rail. I set the bottom focus to 99860 and the top to 100400, which yielded 19 exposures. I took a few manual exposures to check things, then deleted those.

I had lightroom directly capture the images, which it saved as DNG files. When it finished, I used Ctrl-A to select them all, then used the lightroom export to generate TIF files, putting them back into the same directory without resizing or renaming.

Then I launched Zerene and a Windows file explorer. I could use Ctrl-A in the windows file explorer to select all of the files (DNG and TIF) and dumped them all into Zerene. Zerene warned me, but ignored the DNG files it was unable to cope with. Once they were in, I used "Stack, Pmax" to do the stacking, which took about a minute. When it was done, I saved the result (not the project) into the same directory again.

When this was done, I went to lightroom, found the final TIF image and moved it to a folder 2022_minerals. My intent is to delete all of the parts and pieces in the working folder when I am done and just keep the final TIF for any stacked photo I take.

I am using my Canon 1D mark III with the APS_H sensor. This is 3888 by 2592 pixels and 28.1 by 18.7 mm in size. I cropped my exports to be square, and with the 3x setting on the lens, these should be 6.2 mm on a side.


Feedback? Questions? Drop me a line!

Tom's Computer Info / [email protected]