Electron Microscope

Splashery stretches a drumhead over this Splash's outline, twelve inches across, and finds the ways it can ring. Its lowest is 993.5 Hz, 90 cents flat of C6, the nearest tine on the comb. The next fifteen are its overtones, and each one draws its own figure: sand gathers on the lines that stay still.

Tap a grain or shell to zoom in, again to look closer; a third tap goes back out. Tap another to zoom on it.

A scanning electron microscope sweeps a fine beam of electrons across a sample in a vacuum. Where the beam hits, the surface gives off low-energy electrons, and a detector counts them, point by point, into a gray picture. More escape where the beam meets the surface at a slant, so edges and spines glow, and the side facing away from the detector falls into shadow. It can show things far smaller than light can: pollen grains a few hundredths of a millimeter across, the rows of tiny pores in a diatom's glass shell, or the frozen droplets on a snowflake (snow is imaged cold, in a special stage).

The samples here are built for the splash in a microscope's grays. Tap any grain, shell, or crystal to zoom in from the whole field to it, then to its surface. Vision in the Splash tab recolors the picture: the realistic gray, a night-vision scope's green, or an infrared camera's colors (for fun: an electron microscope sees no color).

Made in Splashery. Its code is MIT.

This link opens it in the Playground. To put it on your own page, add the element and one script tag. Every option.