A young girl is splashed as she takes an elephant bath at Rapti river in Chitwan, Nepal, 30 October 2021. Chitwan is one of the major tourist destinations in Nepal and popular zone for wild life sightseeing in Chitwan National Park. (Photo by Narendra Shrestha/EPA/EFE)

Times Square was one of many NYC locations where thousands filled the crossroads of the world to celebrate the Biden/Harris election win over Donald Trump on Saturday, November 7, 2020. This couple was thrilled with the news reenacting the famous sailor nurse WW2 victory in Times Square kiss. (Photo by Michael Nigro/Pacific Press/Rex Features/Shutterstock)

People wait for a subway train to depart Union Square station, in New York City on June 1, 2025. (Photo by Kevin Coombs/Reuters)

In this April 13, 2018 photo, motorcycle taxi driver Ricardo Medina, 60, transports vegetable vender Rigoberto Herrera Mendez, left, and coconut vendor Osvaldo Ochoa in Campo Florido, east of Havana, Cuba. The three men expressed hope that new government leadership will improve things, saying the country cannot move backwards. “We survive life with our work”, said Medina. (Photo by Ramon Espinosa/AP Photo)

Soyuz MS-12 spacecraft with crew members of Expedition 59/60 Russian cosmonaut Alexey Ovchinin, NASA astronauts Christina Koch and Nick Hague lifts off from the launch pad at the Russian leased Baikonur cosmodrome, Kazakhstan, 15 March 2019. Hague, Koch, and Ovchinin will spend six-and-a-half months living and working aboard the International Space Station. (Photo by Sergei Ilnitsky/EPA/EFE)

A Typhoon jet flown by Flt Lt Jim Peterson practising over RAF Coningsby in the East Lindsey district of Lincolnshire, England on September 27, 2019 producing a rainbow effect over the plane. The rainbow is made of crystalized or frozen water vapor that reflect and refract sunlight, causing the rainbow effect. (Photo by Claire Hartley/Bav Media)

Haitians pull a car atop a pushcart in Port-au-Prince, October 11, 1994. The price of gasoline has fallen to about $6 US per gallon since U.S. forces occupied Haiti. Before, gasoline had cost as much as $10 U.S. per gallon. (Photo by Eric Draper/AP Photo)

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)