Structure! and pretty pretty pictures.

Bingo! The crystals worked. I got a full structure with excellent probability ellipsoids. There is a little disorder in one of the tert-butyl groups, but that's almost to be expected, and certainly won't keep this from being a publishable structure. Fantastic!

In other good news I was reading up on how to take pictures of crystals with a regular camera on the internet. The only thing that I found was that people would focus one ocular of the microscope, shine a really really bright light on the crystals and then take the picture just by holding the lens of the camera up to the lens of the microscope. I was exteremly skeptical that this would produce anything worthwhile, but for lack of better ideas (and a little spare time on my hands in between reactions) thought I would give it a try. Eureka! It works! I used my labmates xenon bulb mega flashlight for the light source (it hurts your eyes to look at what the flashlight is shining on at close range, but works well under the microscope) and the crappy lab microscope with a regular digital camera. The crystals shown are the same batch I just got the crystal structure of.

I'm also including this on my colors checklist. Yellow. Check. These crystals are of a cobalt complex, which is were the color comes from.