THE LANGTON MATRAVERS MEETING

Another successful meeting was held in the Village Hall of this charming Dorset village. Brian Darnton has kindly provided the following report:

The Autumn Purbeck Meeting.

On November the Fourth an open meeting of the Purbeck combined QMC and PMS societies was held at the Village hall of Langton Matravers.. Despite the appalling weather preceding the event it was well attended. During the day there were the usual visitors from the area including a class from a local school .

Klaus Kemp brought examples of his skilfully produced mounts of Diatoms and Butterfly scales. He was assisted by Sidney Harvey who also offered a limited number of microscopic articles for sale. Ken and Bettie Jones also ran their stall of extremely useful pieces of optical equipment. Mike and Joan Bingley demonstrated the result of a recent visit to Fraser Island Queensland Australia. They had examples of highly coloured sands from the area mounted for examination under low power.

Derek Stevens as well as organising this years event, ran a continuous live show of mobile desmids and occasionally rested them by the producing a kaleidoscope show of polarised objects. Fred Loxton and Charlotte Wheatly brought a superb collection of Dancer and other microscopic photographs. Gordon Griffin trekked over from Portsmouth to show his engineered adaptation of a fine drawing attachment with an example of diatoms set up for those who would try it out. An unexpected visitor was Wim van Egmond a representative of the NVVM, (the Dutch Microscopic Society) who delighted us with reversal film of microscopic objects. He had travelled all the way from Holland for the meeting. His unrivalled standard of photography is well known on our British Micscape WWW site where he is an enthusiastic contributor.

Richard Speight brought a Cook Troughton and Simms and a Watson Kima both adapted for viewing various objects in crossed polars. Richard had various examples of sub-stage filters made of Sellotape for stepped phase shifting as published in his well known Quekett article. Arthur Burton brought some fine examples of objects for dark ground illumination as well as some of his excellent micrography of that subject. Brian Darnton had examples of his latest interest in fern scales from around the world viewed using polarised light. They were actually inspired by a QMC London meeting some 4 years ago when a Victorian example was shown.