Wow, so I've got 3 followers, now, nice! Hooray for Reddit!

I mentioned before that I had a scan of 17,000 images or so. The truth is, that's actually five scans of 3000-odd x/y scans each, just at different Z heights. The purpose of that is to eliminate the need to autofocus: If you have a usable focal depth of, say, 50 microns, and the variability of the sample or bed is 200 microns, just blindly do 5 scans at 0, 50, 100, 150, and 200 microns Z height variance. 

Then, you can compare the focus quality after the fact for each sub-image, and pick the best before doing stitching, as in this more-comment-than-code snippet:

def variance_of_laplacian(image):
	# compute the Laplacian of the image and then return the focus
	# measure, which is simply the variance of the Laplacian
	return cv2.Laplacian(image, cv2.CV_64F).var()

 (https://github.com/yuji3w/ladybug/blob/master/utils/blur.py)

Hooray, brute force! If I were saying that this is an efficient way of going about things, I would be lying through my teeth. But it is a way of faking depth of field if you're not smart enough to do autofocus in real time.

I got lazy and did NOT bother to do that here for my extra-close-up of his nose. And those eyelashes. Wow. 

Full image here: https://www.easyzoom.com/imageaccess/08c28e0a1ce84eac8a3fb6193ceb004d

The color variation is a consequence of the stitching software and not seen in the original raw pieces.

I tried a couple things different for the back half of the 50. I stuck it to a piece of metal with which I stuck to a piece of metal with magnets instead of using tape, which worked alright. Interestingly adding all that weight reduced the magnitude, but increased the duration, of the bed vibration as observed when changing the Z height.  

This obscures the corners, too, and adds area of shininess, which confuses the heck out of the USB microscope's auto exposure. 

(50% scale).

one thing I did was using a much higher step size for moving the scope --- 480 and 340 steps in the X and Y dimensions, as opposed to 200x200 before. The stitching program had no trouble withit, and in fact I think it results in less color variance and warping. however, the resolution is also a bit lower, though I'll have to do tests side-by-side to confirm! I am wondering if microsoft ICE is doing oversampling and faking those pixels a bit. 

What should I scan next?