The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning

Ed Nisley's Blog: Shop notes, electronics, firmware, machinery, 3D printing, laser cuttery, and curiosities. Contents: 100% human thinking, 0% AI slop.

The New Hotness

  • Monarch Caterpillar Windshield

    The Monarch Butterfly egg produced a teeny caterpillar:

    Monarch caterpillar - 3 mm - 2017-08-02
    Monarch caterpillar – 3 mm – 2017-08-02

    Each time it molts, it eats all of its skin except for the transparent cap over the first body segment:

    Monarch Windshield - 2017-08-09
    Monarch Windshield – 2017-08-09

    If the rest of the caterpillar were behind the windshield, it’d be feet-upward with its “face” at the top.

    The picture comes from a focus-stacked set of microscope images captured with VLC; I turned the positioner’s elevation knob the smallest possible amount between each of 16 images along the 1 mm (-ish) height of the capsule. This magic incantation applies more weight to high-contrast and high-entropy regions:

    align_image_stack -C -a monarch vlcsnap-2017-08-09-18h4*
enfuse --contrast-weight=0.8 --entropy-weight=0.8 -o Monarch_Windshield.jpg monarch00*
# empty line to reveal underscores in previous line

    That came out pretty well.