A reveller attends the “Amigos da Onça” street party on the second day of Carnival on February 10, 2024 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. (Photo by Buda Mendes/Getty Images)

Anda Oliveira, 34, enjoys a waterfall in the Tijuca National Park, one of the world's biggest urban forests, marking the World Water Day in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil on March 15, 2024. (Photo by Pilar Olivares/Reuters)

A coil-shaped Helix Nebula showing a fine web of filamentary “bicycle-spoke” features embedded in the colorful red and blue ring of gas. At 650 light-years away, the Helix is one of the nearest planetary nebulae to Earth. A planetary nebula is the glowing gas around a dying, Sun-like star. (Photo by Reuters/NASA)

Daisy Lowe attends Maybelline's Bring On The Night Party on February 18, 2017 in London, United Kingdom (Photo by Jeff Spicer/Getty Images)

A police officer stands at a police cordon near the scene of a terror attack in London, U.K., on Sunday, June 4, 2017. A van swerved into Saturday-night crowds on London Bridge, before three men got out and went on a stabbing rampage through nearby bars. (Photo by Luke MacGregor/Bloomberg)

English singer and songwriter Anne-Marie performs on stage during day two of Capital's Jingle Bell Ball with Seat at London's O2 Arena on December 8, 2019. (Photo by Isabel Infantes/PA Images via Getty Images)

People look at a man, who residents said was killed by al Qaeda militants, hanging on a bridge in Yemen's southeastern city of Mukalla June 17, 2015. Al Qaeda militants in Yemen killed two alleged Saudi spies, residents said, accusing them of planting tracking devices which enabled the assassination of the group's leader in a suspected U.S. drone strike. (Photo by Reuters/Stringer)

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)