SCIENCE! continued

This is a continuation/update from my last post.

First off, as I said in the update to the previous post, the time lapse that we took overnight to try to make a video of the dye progressions, well, it didn't work so well. But I did add a new image to that post which shows off some of the dye showing up on the outside of the unopened blossoms.

The science experiment continues, and has definitely had some interesting aspects to it. My son's enthusiasm has waned a bit, but I think that is to be expected of a 5 year old. Of course, today he proudly proclaimed "I have a hypothesis! I think the leaves are going to turn purple!" (The show Dinosaur Train (warning: sound on that web page) has a character that makes lots of hypotheses).

Figure yes our counter is messy, for Science! (hush)

One of the things that my wife and I found really neat was that the dye seems to be separating out and we can see some blue highlights. The edges look a bit more purple to me today than it had previously, which is pretty neat. Plus, there now seems to be some of the dye showing up on the interior of some of the petals, where previously it had seemed to be confined to the edges. Also, one of the blossoms that had been previously closed has started to open, which was something I wasn't expecting. 

Figure this is my favorite picture from this project so far

Finally, because this flower has just started blooming, I've now set it up with the webcam and ChronoLapse to see if I can get a time lapse video of it opening. I think I may have to add some more water to the vase tomorrow though. It isn't in danger of drying out, but I want to make sure that it won't. I also think we added enough dye the first time that we won't have to add any more even if we double the current volume of water.

SCIENCE!

I started a science experiment with my older son today.

Let me go back a few days though. One day last week, I was able to get out of work a bit earlier than normal. I decided since I actually had a bit of time before getting home, I would pick up some flowers for my wife, because she's awesome and sometimes I like to get her flowers to let her know she's awesome. They had lilies, which my wife is fond of, so that was the flower of choice.

Today, I remembered, or thought I remembered at least, that if you add food coloring to the water in a vase, then the coloring would eventually end up showing in the flower petals. After asking my wife's permission (they were her lilies after all) I got my older son to help me add some maroon food coloring and a bit of extra water to the vase. I also re-cut the stems, about 1 cm of the end of each, in the possibly mistaken belief that this would help speed up the uptake of the new water.

We also started a table to keep track of our observations, seen below. You can tell that I am a terrible speller without spell checker.

Figure teaching my son bad science habits like using pencil instead of pen

As you can see from our second observation, we actually started to see some change around the edges of the flower petals in the form of red "tick" marks. Since I now carry a camera around with me everywhere, just like almost everybody else in this country, I decided to take a picture:

Figure you know you're looking at sex organs, right?

It's hard to see it from the whole picture, so here is a zoom in near the tip of the flower petal on the bottom:

Figure my phone takes better pictures than I thought it could, this was simply a crop

One thing I was really surprised by was the first presence of the dye on the tips of the petals. I was expecting to see "rays" of red emanating from the center of the flower. But then, that is why you do the experiment! :)

Now I am running the program ChronoLapse and have set the lily up in front of my webcam to see if I can get a time lapse video out of it that shows something cool, hopefully the pigment either getting darker or spreading out more. If the video turns out well I'll probably post it. however, my web cam is hard to focus well, and has a resolution of 640 x 480, so cropping won't give me the zoom in effect like it does on my phone. However, if dramatic changes do occur, it should be a pretty cool video.

There is also always the possibility that Big Foot will break into our house to smell the color changing Lilies. Or the two-year old could become involved.

The best part of all of this? My son is super excited to make observations and see how it changes. Yay science!

UPDATE: The time lapse video didn't show much in the way of color spread. It did, however, show what happens during the sunrise which was pretty cool. The "ticks" on the petal edges are now darker, and we saw some red splotches on the outside of the closed flowers as well.

Figure I'm even less witty in the morning