BELFAST, Northern Ireland, Nov. 6, 2015 — Andor Technology Ltd. and Bitplane AG, both Oxford Instruments companies, have announced three first-place winners of their 2015 Insight Awards, a scientific imaging competition.
The winning entry in the physical sciences category was submitted by astrophotographer Bill Snyder and was acquired using an Apogee U16 CCD camera. The Cygnus Wall is in the North America Nebula, approximately 1800 light-years from Earth.
'Spider Autofluorescence,' by Mátyás Molnár. Courtesy of Andor Technology Ltd.
In the life sciences category, Gopi Shah of the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics in Dresden, Germany, used a home-built light-sheet microscope setup with two Andor Zyla scientific CMOS cameras to capture video of a developing zebrafish embryo where each cell nucleus was labelled with green fluorescent protein. Two opposite views of the sample were fused post-acquisition to reconstruct the entire embryo in 3D.
Mátyás Molnár of Uppsala University in Sweden won the Imaris category using a light-sheet microscope in three channels with 405-, 488- and 561-nm laser excitation. The 3D dataset was converted into a maximum intensity projection image using Bitplane’s Imaris 3D/4D visualization and analysis software.
For more information, visit www.theinsightawards.com.