This morning, Raymund Fromme, led us through the process of taking X-ray diffraction pictures of crystals. Firstly we selected a crystal. It turns out that a nice looking crystal may not have good internal crystal structure.
I was amazed how quickly Raymund was able to fish out a crystal with a small loop and set up the crystal correctly in front of the x-ray beam. The two pictures at 0 and 90 degress took 1 minute each to take and 2 minutes for the computor to read. We got good diffraction patterns with the second crystal and the computor was able to calculate the cell size of 38,74,79 A. This compares well with the accepted values of 36,78,78 Angstroms.
We also took digital photos of our philocyonene crytals which came out very well.