TV Personality Courtney Stodden attends OK! Magazine's pre-GRAMMY event at Avalon Hollywood on February 9, 2017 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by Splash News and Pictures)

A Comic Con attendee poses during the 2014 New York Comic Con at Jacob Javitz Center on October 9, 2014 in New York City. (Photo by Daniel Zuchnik/Getty Images)

A picture made available on 17 September 2014 shows extreme athletes resting in hammocks on webbings stretched between rocks during the International Highline Meeting in Monte Piana, near Misurina, in the northern Italian Alps, Italy, 08 September 2014. (Photo by Balazs Mohai/EPA)

A costumed fan attends Comic-Con International 2014 – Day 1 on July 24, 2014 in San Diego, Calif. (Photo by Joe Scarnici/FilmMagic/Getty Images)

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)

Men from the Kenyan Maasai tribe perform a traditional jumping-ritual among fellow members of a common age-set as they observe a rite of passage to mark the transition of an age-set to cultural junior elder from Moran (Maasai for warrior age-set) at a manyatta or traditional homestead built specifically for the ceremony near Lemek town within the Masai-Mara National Reserve ecosystem in Narok county February 27, 2021. (Photo by Tony Karumba/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)

Third place: the rear leg, claw and respiratory trachea of a louse (Haematopinus suis). (Photo by Frank Reiser/Nassau Community College/Nikon Small World Photomicrography 2021)