Beautiful

cannabineer

Ursus marijanus

lokie

Well-Known Member
I was in Hawai'i in '96. I took home an "Arundina" orchid (Hawaiian bamboo orchid). It didn't make it more than a coupla months.
Now I have a trio of essentially bulletproof Phalaenopsis.
Fancy flowers don't have a chance around me. Not all of them die. I have 1 orchid that is still alive. It has not bloomed
in near 3 years, and grew only 1 new leaf in 4.

Weeds? I have grown a few of those.:weed:
IMG_0006.jpg
 

DCcan

Well-Known Member
While in Hawaii we were in awe of the orchids growing wild everywhere you looked.
So many varieties and colors to see.
Never appreciated them till I saw the US Botanic Garden in DC, they were highlighting them for a year, amazing.
They have a mint exhibit (coleus, sage, rosemary, mint family (Lamiaceae) going on now. It's right in front of the Capital, great place to have a lunch and a puff in DC,the outdoor garden.
orchidsa.jpg national_garden_u.s._botanic_garden_-_aug_2011.jpg
 

cannabineer

Ursus marijanus
Never appreciated them till I saw the US Botanic Garden in DC, they were highlighting them for a year, amazing.
They have a mint exhibit (coleus, sage, rosemary, mint family (Lamiaceae) going on now. It's right in front of the Capital, great place to have a lunch and a puff in DC,the outdoor garden.
View attachment 4324333 View attachment 4324332
Back when I was an adolescent in DC, the Botanical Gardens were a favorite haunt. I vividly remember Cattleya orchids surrounding the entrance from the vestibule. They smelled intensely and wonderfully of bubble gum. The good kind, Fleer or Dubble Bubble.
 

cannabineer

Ursus marijanus
I found a lovely collection of extreme close-ups of butterfly and moth wings. They call them macro photographs, but they are what I learned to think of as photomicrographs.

The two b&w SEM pics are at a known scale of 200x and 1000x respectively.
The brilliant color of butterfly wings is often enhanced by iridescence, a diffraction phenomenon created by repeating layers of semi-reflective material. The more magnified pics show some of these structures.

~edit~ I suspect some of these pics have been colorized. The structures shown at 2000+x are waay to sharp to be optical photographs. I believe the colors were processed in, but at that scale they should be blurrier simply because the wavelength would be 1 to 3 mm (to scale, so to speak).









 
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GreatwhiteNorth

Global Moderator
Staff member
I had one of these when I was a kid. It was in an acrylic display box. I set it in my bedroom where from my bed I could see it easily. It was the most glorious saturated iridescent blue. Species is Morpho menelaus, and mine was a solid 5 inches in wingspan.

I don't see an abdomen - probably beneath the hind of wings?
 
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