Look up! It's Monday!
Makes me wonder if it's prey, predators or posture that warrant this eye placement.

https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/366225765 (no good id yet)

#setzkasten #hymenoptera #ichneumonidae

A long snout for #WeevilWednesday - actually the whole beetle is just 2mm long.

There are several candidates which are all very fond of clover, I'm leaning towards #protapion apricans because of the characteristic half-dark-half-yellow front tibia, but the picture doesn't capture the antenna well.

Zoomable:
https://setzkasten.relet.net/#?protapion

And on #inaturalist
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/364462528

#wildlife #setzkasten #norway

Trying a new stitch... and since I may have been a bit too optimistic about how low I can go with the settings, automatic feature detection is struggling - At 80x I usually scan with a step size of 0.3mm and lots of overlap, but then I would be in for ten days of scanning. This attempt is with 0.6mm which works for 40x. Just enough overlap here, but to match features between neighboring images is difficult even for me.

So I loaded the panorama in grid mode -fixed control points where I know the images overlap - which gave me some new insight into compound eyes. Now I wonder if the wasps run #ptgui or #hugin in their heads...

Aglaostigma aucupariae, the red belted cleaver, a sawfly.

Here is the "regular" macro shot, for comparison:
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/360981049

#setzkasten #inaturalist #hymenoptera #tenthredinidae #wildlife

I may have gone slightly overboard with the #focusstacking, but it worked. Improved the lighting a bit, and returned the #frankenscope to the photo tent. Still more to be done. The long legs made me miss a few corners, so in the end that's ~250 stacks with a total of ~50000 captures, all for one #gnat. Might be a #mycomya from the antenna colours, tiger stripes and wing veination?

Unfortunately, the usually excellent book delivery service for the public libraries went bankrupt, so I cannot just order keys from the universities. Might be I will find a key online. As usual, I'd be happy for any id help, as far as that is possible from the pictures.

https://setzkasten.relet.net/#?Mycetophilidae

https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/351543549

#diptera #mycetophilidae #inaturalist #norway #wildlife #entomology #setzkasten

This is why I love #focusstacking. Look at the wrinkles on the neck of that gnat. The hairy compound eyes. The little grey ocellus(?) Next to it. Anyone good with gnat anatomy? #setzkasten

I think I fixed the focus runoff issues on the #frankenscope, and if nothing else interrupts the current run, that's a 12x16 grid being captured in 130 layers at 80x magnification.

Progress on the #frankenscope. Since all the software is networked, I just moved the scanning stack onto a cube PC. The machine is connected via one of our edge routers to 5G, and sits in a #tailscale/#headscale network.

That turns it into a fully remote operated #microscope. I can explore the slide, mark an extent, start a scan and monitor the progress.

Currently I am still tuning the scanning process, which seems to be ever so slightly running away from what should be a mechanical endstop. Then some traveling, and still crossing fingers for some more content to #setzkasten soon.