Girls during a class at the Teire Irish dance school in Moscow, Russia on March 15, 2019. (Photo by Sergei Karpukhin/TASS)

Russian cadets march during the annual cadet schools get-together in Moscow, Russia on March 30, 2018. (Photo by Mladen Antonov/AFP Photo)

A girl goes to school just before sunrise in Frankfurt, Germany, Wednesday, December 11, 2019. (Photo by Michael Probst/AP Photo)

An elephant “kisses” a visitor during a show at an elephant training school in Xishuangbanna, Yunnan province, April 18, 2015. Some 16 elephants live at the school and give four 30-minute performances everyday for visitors. (Photo by Wong Campion/Reuters)

School teachers and staff members take part during an active shooter training at James I. O'Neill High School in Highland Falls, New York, U.S., December 12, 2017. (Photo by Eduardo Munoz/Reuters)

School children take shelter under desks during a tsunami simulation drill ahead of World Tsunami Awareness Day at Futaba elementary school in Choshi, Chiba Prefecture, Japan, November 4, 2016. (Photo by Kim Kyung-Hoon/Reuters)

A girl peeps at a gate as primary school students enter to attend an open air class near their school building as part of an initiative from the government following restrictions imposed to control the spread of the Covid-19 coronavirus, in Kolkata on February 7, 2022. (Photo by Dibyangshu Sarkar/AFP 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)