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)

This image is NGC 6543 known as the Cat's Eye Nebula as it appears to the Chandra X-Ray Observatory and Hubble Telescope. A planetary nebula is a phase of stellar evolution that the sun should experience several billion years from now, when it expands to become a red giant and then sheds most of its outer layers, leaving behind a hot core that contracts to form a dense white dwarf star. This image was released October 10, 2012. (Photo by J. Kastner/NASA/CXC/RIT)

Russian artist Maria Gazanova (L) works on her "The Alive Painting" art work during the Art Krasnoyarsk annual festival in Siberian city of Krasnoyarsk, Russia November 4, 2015. (Photo by Ilya Naymushin/Reuters)

A hostage runs towards a police officer outside Lindt cafe, where other hostages are being held, in Martin Place in central Sydney December 15, 2014. Two more hostages have run out of the cafe at the center of a siege in Sydney, Australia's largest city, according to a Reuters witness at the site. The two women were both wearing aprons indicating they were staff at the Lindt cafe where a gunman has been holding an unknown number of hostages for several hours. Three men had earlier run out of the cafe. (Photo by Jason Reed/Reuters)

A walruses at Hagenbeck Zoo in Hamburg, Germany on July, 7, 2015. (Photo by Werner Struss/Startraks action)

A Japanese Ground Self-Defense Force Type 92 Mine sweeping vehicle fires a rocket behind a Type 74 armoured tank during an annual training session, which is based on a scenario to defend or retake islands in Japanese territory, near Mount Fuji at Higashifuji training field in Gotemba, west of Tokyo, August 18, 2015. (Photo by Yuya Shino/Reuters)

Bull Rider Dalton Kasel rides The Good Stuff during the second round of the PBR Unleash The Beast Monster Energy Buckoff at Madison Square Garden in New York, January 8, 2022. (Photo by Timothy A. Clary/AFP Photo)

This is the moment a lamb appears to be doing kung fu as it plays with its friends in a field overlooking Kimmeridge Bay in Dorset on April 11, 2022. (Photo by Donna White/Bournemouth News)