In my high school physics class we measured the pitch between the tracks of a CD using the same principle. You just need a light source with a known wavelength, like a laser. It was a pretty cool experiment!
I've since bought a microscope imager, that provides an output over USB. But I think I need to remove the OM converter, and get a shorter adapter to successfully attach to the microscope C-Mount.
then I get this illuminator: https://www.amazon.com/AmScope-LED-6W-Powerful-Gooseneck-Ill... for top-down viewing, and it can be adjusted for bottom-up illumination.
Then you can buy samples- microscope slides, petri dishes and samples,f rom places like Carolina Biological.
if I have seen farther, or closer in this case, then I would like to thank all the giant shoulders upon which I have stood (seriously- look up ernst abbe, he's amazing, he created the 8-hour workday!)
> The pits and lands do not directly represent the 0s and 1s of binary data. Instead, non-return-to-zero, inverted encoding is used: a change from either pit to land or land to pit indicates a 1, while no change indicates a series of 0s. There must be at least two, and no more than ten 0s between each 1, which is defined by the length of the pit. This, in turn, is decoded by reversing the eight-to-fourteen modulation used in mastering the disc, and then reversing the cross-interleaved Reed–Solomon coding, finally revealing the raw data stored on the disc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compact_disc#Physical_details
These encoding types are used to improve the "tracking" of the laser head, and to keep the timing consistent. We want the medium to regularly have changes between pits and lands to synchronise the timing and speed of the disc. The encoding scheme enforces this.
It's wild it's as complex as it is! Though it makes sense it seems way more robust