Most people know Nikon as a purveyor of pro and consumer-grade digital cameras. But the company's expertise with optics bleeds over into related markets – it's one of the science community's major suppliers of microscopes. And each year the company asks the community to send it some of their favorite images of tiny objects. A panel of scientists and journalists have chosen the best of this past year's submissions, which Nikon has placed on its Small World site.

Photo: Honorable Mention. “Snow crystal, illuminated with colored lights (5x)”. (Photo by Dr. Kenneth Libbrecht, California Institute of Technology (Caltech), Department of Physics, Pasadena, California, USA)

Scores of internally displaced Muslims are at the heart of the humanitarian crisis in Central African Republic, where violence between Christians and Muslims has threatened to spiral into genocide. Photo: An internally displaced woman carries her child in a camp for internally displaced people (IDPs), located at Bangui International Airport, April 10, 2014. (Photo by Goran Tomasevic/Reuters)

Protesters sit in a cafe during a “SlutWalk” protest, in which several hundred participants march through the centre of Jerusalem, May 13, 2016. The SlutWalk movement began after a Toronto policeman suggested in 2011 that women could avoid sexual assault by not dressing like a “sl*t”. (Photo by Amir Cohen/Reuters)

Shortlisted: Pooyan Shadpoor, Houcheraghi. While walking along the shore of Larak, Iran – an island in the Persian Gulf – Shadpoor came across this luminous scene. The “magical lights of (the) plankton ... enchanted me so that I snapped the shot”, he writes. (Photo by Pooyan Shadpoor/2016 EPOTY)

Astronaut Donald R. Pettit would often rig an array of as many as six cameras in the cupola windows and set them all to fire continuously for events such as sunsets, which only last around seven seconds on the ISS. (Photo by Donald R. Pettit)

Tsunami, an eleven year old female Sumatran Orangutan eats a fruit platter during her birthday celebration at the National Zoo Ape Center in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, Thursday, December 31, 2015. (Photo by Manan Vatsyayana/AFP Photo)

Steam emerges from a cooling tower of the nuclear power plant Leibstadt near Leibstadt, Switzerland, November 18, 2014. (Photo by Arnd Wiegmann/Reuters)

A man sits under lanterns and decorations on a street ahead of the Chinese Lunar New Year in Chinatown Yangon, Myanmar January 23, 2017. (Photo by Soe Zeya Tun/Reuters)