Mexican colours

Was in Santiago de Querétaro for a conference earlier this fall so there will be some photos from there posted here.
We were there just before Mexico celebrates independece day on Sept 16. For the whole week before the city was completely draped in the national colours, with flags, banners, dresses, hats and trinkets all in green, white and red.

Westbahnhof

The U-Bahn station Westbahnhof in Vienna. The walls are bright orange, and quite ugly. As an experiment I decided to strip the image to the bare essentials - only black and white. No grey-scales.
A few more of my photos of Vienna can be found in this gallery.

Electrodes

A couple of years worth of carbon nanotube modified ITO electrodes that I've used in my research. I am not allowed to throw them away, but since they are not reusable there is not really any need to store them in a space wasting sorted manner. Thus, a carton full of electrodes.

Twin towers

A photo of two spectroscopy cuvettes filled with aqueous electrolyte. The cuvettes were used as cells in an electrochromism experiment. I used time-lapse photography to record the process. This photo was taken during the setup of the experiment, but I like the clean style of the photo in its own right.

Brass buskers

This band has an unusual style of busking. Instead of sitting and playing in a place with lots of people they walk around in residential areas and ask for money from people looking out the windows. They play some sort of Balkan Brass Band music, seemingly inspired by Bregovic and the like. They are actually quite good, but with an annoyingly small repertoire.

Horses in my dreams...

A few days ago I took a long walk in the lovely autumn weather. I ended up in one of those places I love in Warsaw that I like to call the Warsaw countryside. It's close to the centre, the landmark PKiN is clearly visible, but still has a nice feeling of serenity.

Mouldy cup

Last week I was at a conference. When I came back to work I found my coffee mug looking like the image above. Obviously something needed to be done. The first thing was of course to extract some mould and put it under the microscope. 

In an optical microscope a network of fibres can be seen. To have a closer look one can but a piece of the mould into the SEM. Then we see this.

Lots of tiny cells clinging to some long fibre like structures. A closer view can look like this.

or like this

Yeah, yeah... the colouring of that last image is a bit hopeless... I was tired. 

I really like these flower-like ends of the fibres.

Apparently mould is really beautiful close up. Another reason not to be too fast with washing your coffee-mug.

Tree stump

This tree is likely to be frequently photographed. It lies just next to the path in one of the more popular valleys in the Polish Tatras, where hundreds of people pass every day during high season. This was the first and last time I was there during the peak of the season. It's really hard to be able to enjoy the nature when you have to stand in line even to get in to the national park.

Typical Poland

A picture showing a very typical Polish landscape. Flat, with plently of small fields of grain. The village can be seen in the distance, and even that symbol of the Polish country-side, a stork, is seen a black smudge over the tree-line.

Hugging crystals

We have a new scanning electron microscope at work. This is an image of two interleaved crystals of hopeite on a zinc surface.