It is finally spring break here for Uni Melbourne students! I am going on a short trip with another American girl to Tasmania, so I'll be offline until I get back on Wednesday night. Until then, I'll leave you with these cool pictures I took today through the microscope. The cool, but unfortunate, thing about the bottom picture is that the crystals I wanted were mixed in with excess ligand that had come out of solution and crystallized. This sample was intended for elemental analysis, so I spent a lot of time on the microscope trying to separate the clear ligand from the blue complex to avoid a biased result from the analysis.

Diamond network crystals.

Stacked sheet crystals (NO3 counter ions) mixed with crystallized ligand. There is also a fiber in the top right corner from the filter paper I used to collect the crystals.

Stephanie