I use a Canon S95 and it takes great shots through the eyepiece. Any cheap point and shoot will work well as long as it has a small lens and there is no dust in the lens.

I knew that the mushroom was not a Trappea species, but MO requires a name in order to make a post and so I put down Trappea since the gleba feels like that of a Trappea species but then I also checked the doubtful box. Matt and Jim Trappe both think that it is a Scleroderma and I do have a Scleroderma that fruits abundantly nearby but the spore size is all wrong and I have never seen a Scleroderma with sticky rubbery-gelatinous gleba like this thing. Darv suggested Astraeus and that fruits all over where this thing was found – but is much smaller and has larger spores.
Debbie wanted to see the micrograph – but my digital camera will not give me a decent shot through the eyepiece so I am stuck for now.

The thick, layered wall looks like Astraeus hygrometricus, but it has spores with small projections and does not look smooth. The color, elastic membrane and spore size all appear to be a good fit.

and maybe mount it in water rather than KOH? some of the truffle spore ornamentation gets dissolved by KOH.

I agree that it can’t be Trappea…but we can surely do better than just Fungi sp.

The three known species of Trappea from North America all have small, thin walled, ellipsoid to oblong spores.

For descriptions of Trappea, see

Castellano, M.A. (1990). The new genus Trappea (Basidiomycotina, Hysterangiaceae), a segregate from Hysterangium. Mycotaxon 38: 1-9.

States, J.S. (1991). A new false truffle in the genus Trappea (Hysterangiaceae). Mycotaxon 41: 127-133.

For pics of Trappea darkeri, see

http://www.mykoweb.com/CAF/species/Trappea_darkeri.html