A Quote from a Famous T.S. Eliot Poem Viewed under the Microscope
In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.
— The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, by T.S. Eliot.
This is one of my favourite lines from one of my favourite poems, and I wanted to view it under the microscope. I wrote the quote in normal-sized font on a piece of paper, and used panoramic stitching and some computer magic to create a single microscopic image of the quote.
The final result was a ridiculously huge 70k x 18k pixel, 868 megabyte image. We’re officially in the gigapixel territory. It’s so large, in fact, that you’d need an array of about 50 ultra-high-definition 8k monitors to view the image as it is meant to be. It also means that you can’t really view the image properly at all. Processing this gave my GPU a run for its money, but it was worth all the infernal moments of lag.
You can find the image here, since Medium can’t handle it:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1yPum8GqND0W0OzF1XZogSx-eQzDXk4Ra/view
(The file was too laggy for me to smooth out the edges, deal with it.)
The following is strictly a preview; this is a screenshot of the image with some horrible graphics work:
This was more of an artistic endeavor than a scientific one. I wasn’t out to make findings; I just wanted to create an epic panorama, and I did. I stitched hundreds of images over multiple panels and had to push my laptop to the limit. It was difficult, but amazing.
And this is just a stepping stone.
All images were taken at 40x total magnification. Images captured using a mid-range phone camera and a microscope-camera adapter. Panoramic stitching was performed using PTGui and IrfanView. Photos were adjusted as necessary.