Yay for improved photos locations!

Once upon a time, a long time ago, I took some very high-resolution photos of my thin sections. This has been ever so helpful over the course of my project, because I can look at the photos of the samples on my computer, rather than going in to uni to look at the samples themselves through the microscope. Indeed, these photos are so good (and they'd better be at 54 MB each)that I can often see more detail zooming in on the photo than I can through the cheap student-grade microscope in my office. However, one of my samples wound up having a second session on the microprobe, during which I analyzed a line across a rather large feldspar grain. As it turns out, said grain happened to fall well off the edge of the photo I had for that sample. It was also much too big to bother trying take a back-scatter-image whilst on the microprobe--feldspar grains show up in BSE as rather featureless, and this one was much larger than the widest field of view available. Therefore I put onto my "to-do" list that I needed to take another photo of this thin section, and make certain to get that large grain. I eventually got to that photo session a week or so back, and today finally made the time to align that photo with the original photo and x-y locations of the analysis points in ArcMap. As a result I am now able to align the graph of the composition of the grain, which bounces up and down in a seemingly random pattern, with the photo of the grain. And it turns out that the bouncing in composition is *not* random at all, but instead corresponds nicely to grain boundaries between a bunch of composite smaller grains which make up half of the large grain. Now that I can *see* the pattern, I have been able to edit much of the description for this sample, and the result is an order of magnitude better! The thesis is now longer by 256 words and 4 new figures/tables. Not bad for a day when more than half of my uni work done involved job applications...

It is still early enough to go for a walk, and I need a break, so time to put the computer down for a bit!

Yay for improved photos locations!

Once upon a time, a long time ago, I took some very high-resolution photos of my thin sections. This has been ever so helpful over the course of my project, because I can look at the photos of the samples on my computer, rather than going in to uni to look at the samples themselves through the microscope. Indeed, these photos are so good (and they'd better be at 54 MB each)that I can often see more detail zooming in on the photo than I can through the cheap student-grade microscope in my office. However, one of my samples wound up having a second session on the microprobe, during which I analyzed a line across a rather large feldspar grain. As it turns out, said grain happened to fall well off the edge of the photo I had for that sample. It was also much too big to bother trying take a back-scatter-image whilst on the microprobe--feldspar grains show up in BSE as rather featureless, and this one was much larger than the widest field of view available. Therefore I put onto my "to-do" list that I needed to take another photo of this thin section, and make certain to get that large grain. I eventually got to that photo session a week or so back, and today finally made the time to align that photo with the original photo and x-y locations of the analysis points in ArcMap. As a result I am now able to align the graph of the composition of the grain, which bounces up and down in a seemingly random pattern, with the photo of the grain. And it turns out that the bouncing in composition is *not* random at all, but instead corresponds nicely to grain boundaries between a bunch of composite smaller grains which make up half of the large grain. Now that I can *see* the pattern, I have been able to edit much of the description for this sample, and the result is an order of magnitude better! The thesis is now longer by 256 words and 4 new figures/tables. Not bad for a day when more than half of my uni work done involved job applications...

It is still early enough to go for a walk, and I need a break, so time to put the computer down for a bit!