This is a picture of Vitamin C crystals in double polarized light. I dissolved ascorbic acid powder in water and then placed a drop of this on a glass microscope slide. When it dried, the crystals were flat forming a single plane. I then photographed an attractive pattern in the crystals with my trinocular microscope -- it has two objectives to view the specimen and one to connect with a camera. The lens that captured the image was one of the objectives in the microscope, not a normal macro lens. The magnification here is 60X. To generate the color, one piece of polarizing material was placed in front of the light source backlighting the crystals, and the other polarizer was placed in front of the camera. By turning either of the two polarizers, the colors took on various intensities of brilliantly saturated color. Things that produce the colors of the spectrum with double polarization are called 'birefringent.'
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