Men selling sheep wait for customers at a local livestock market, ahead of the Eid al-Adha festival, in Lagos, Nigeria September 11, 2016. (Photo by Akintunde Akinleye/Reuters)

Filipino Muslims ride on top of a vehicle as they celebrate the end of the holy month of Ramadan in Cotabato city, in southern Philippines, July 16, 2015. Picture taken July 16, 2015. (Photo by Marconi Navales/Reuters)

Bangladeshi railway police try to clear line, as thousands of Bangladeshi Muslims gather to board trains to return home after attending three-day Islamic Congregation on the banks of the River Turag in Tongi, 20 kilometers (13 miles) north of the capital Dhaka, Bangladesh, Sunday, January 26, 2014. (Photo by A. M. Ahad/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)

Mr. Zhong Hua, of Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, took this image of the peripheral nerves (those outside of the brain) in an 11.5-day-old mouse embryo, magnified five times. (Photo by Zhong Hua)

A competition, now in its 43rd year, dedicated to showcasing the beautiful and bizarre as seen under a light microscope attracted over 2,000 entries from 88 countries. Here: Honorable Mention by Emre Can Alagöz, Istanbul, Turkey: The eyes of a jumping spider, magnified 6x. (Photo by Emre Can Alagöz/2017 Nikon Small World Photomicrography Competition)

A girl gets her hands decorated with traditional henna patterns at a roadside stall ahead of Eid-al Fitr to mark the end of the holy fasting month of Ramadan in Karachi, Pakistan, July 17, 2015. (Photo by Akhtar Soomro/Reuters)