Tourists visit teamLab Planets Tokyo in Tokyo on January 10, 2025. Japan on January 15 will announce tourist figures for the year 2024, widely expected to break the record set in 2019. (Photo by Kazuhiro Nogi/AFP Photo)

English radio and television presenter Caroline Flack, 40, seen arriving at Bagatelle restaurant in Mayfair on November 08, 2019 in London, England. (Photo by GORC/GC Images)

A woman sits in a cell at the Los Angeles County Women's jail in Lynwood, California April 26, 2013. (Photo by Lucy Nicholson/Reuters)

Festival goers wear Australia day attire at Big Day Out 2012 at the Sydney Showground on January 26, 2012 in Sydney, Australia. (Photo by Mark Metcalfe/Getty Images)

A seller dressed as Snegurochka (The Snow Maiden) shows Christmas toys at the Christmas decorations set in the Moscow GUM State Department store in Moscow, Russia in Moscow, Russia, Monday, December 16, 2019. (Photo by Pavel Golovkin/AP Photo)

A row of abandoned oil tanks is filled with creepers on the riverside of Liyun River in Huai 'an, East China's Jiangsu Province, May 9, 2023. (Photo credit should read CFOTO/Future Publishing via Getty Images)

A firefighter jumps over a fence while fighting the Palisades Fire in the Pacific Palisades neighborhood of Los Angeles, Tuesday, January 7, 2025. (Photo byh Ethan Swope/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)