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)

Homeless people queue to get free hot food organized by social services during frost winter day in-Kiev on December 18, 2012. Nineteen people died of exposure in Ukraine in the last 24 hours amid temperatures of minus 20 degrees Celsius (minus 4 degrees Fahrenheit), bringing the toll this month to 37, the health ministry said Tuesday. (Photo by Sergei Supinsky/AFP Photo)

“Custer” the smallest car in the US. (Photo by Topical Press Agency/Getty Images). 1920

Parent hedgehogs Maria, left, and Gosha, 2nd right, eat with their albino babies in a private Zoo in Moscow, Russia, Thursday, August 22, 2013. Three rare albino hedgehog babies, born on the same day as Britain's new prince, have moved into a miniature castle at a Moscow petting zoo. The three are named after the Prince of Cambridge – George, Alexander and Louis. On Thursday, when they turned one month old, they were shown their new home at the All-Russia Exhibition Center. (Photo by Alexander Zemlianichenko Jr./AP Photo)

US President Donald Trump' s daughter and senior White House adviser Ivanka Trump (2nd R) poses for a photo on a balcony of the VIP tent at the Olympic sliding centre with US army luge athletes Taylor Morris (L) and Matt Mortensen (2nd L), and US women’s bobsleigh silver medallist Lauren Gibbs (R) before the ski jump tower at the men' s four- man bobsleigh event of the Pyeongchang Winter Olympic games in Pyeongchang on February 25, 2018. (Photo by Eric Gaillard/Reuters)

This undated handout photograph released by Stony Brook University/ Louisiana State University on March 2, 2018, shows an Adélie penguin looking at a drone at breeding colony on Heroina Island, Danger Islands, Antarctica. A thriving “hotspot” of some 1.5 million Adelie penguins has been discovered on the remote Danger Islands in the east Antarctic, surprised scientists announced on March 2, 2018. (Photo by Rachael Herman/AFP Photo/Louisiana State University AND Stony Brook University)

Runner-up. “The heavens opened and the streets around Shibuya, Tokyo, were suddenly drenched in even more colour and movement. I was taking photos (my friend was holding the umbrella) when I noticed this woman at the crossing. I’m pleased with the futuristic feel of the image”. (Photo by Katherine Bridgestock/The Guardian)

The little new born wombat baby APARI sitting in its mothers pouch at the zoo in Duisburg, Germany, Thursday, March 29, 2018. Wombat mother TINSEL once was found in the pouch of its dead mother on a street in Australia and was raised by zookeepers before she came to Germany. The zoo tried for 40 years in vain to breed a wombat, until APARI was born as the first one last week. (Photo by Martin Meissner/AP Photo)