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)

Soldiers try to attach the balloon to their car, June 1944. (Photo by Jared Enos/Mediadrumworld.com)

A) 1st place WINNER – Roy Rimmer. “This rat was in an outdoor set I made, the set up is two meters long and a meter wide made of Perspex,it has a plywood front with holes cut in for my camera and flash guns, I placed two rusty paint cans in the set up and the rat would leap from one can too the other, I had to use flash to freeze the action”.

16-year-old panda, Ye Ye, rests in an enclosure at the Wolong Nature Reserve, a conservation center that trains pandas for release into the wild. This image was published in the August 2016 National Geographic magazine as part of the “Pandas Gone Wild” story. (Photo by Ami Vitale/National Geographic Creative)

Russian model Irina Shayk arrives on September 4, 2022 for the screening of the film “L'Immensita” (Immensity) presented in the Venezia 79 competition as part of the 79th Venice International Film Festival at Lido di Venezia in Venice, Italy. (Photo by Guglielmo Mangiapane/Reuters)

“Honorable Mention”. An Indian rhinoceros, far from home and stuck inside with late-winter blues at the Toronto zoo. Photo location: Toronto, Ontario, Canada. (Photo and caption by Stephen De Lisle/National Geographic Photo Contest)

Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station experiences months of darkness. The sun dips below the horizon on March 21, after which follows several weeks of twilight before complete darkness results. Photo taken on June 25, 2009. (National Science Foundation/Jeremy Johnson)

A Hawaiian cleaner wrasse provides its cleaning services to a yellowfin goatfish in a reef community off the Big Island in Hawaii. Cleaner species help rid their hosts of ectoparasites, dead tissue, bacteria and fungi. Studies have shown cleaning to play a vital role in keeping many reef ecosystems healthy. (Photo by Marty Snyderman/Caters News Agency)