And the award for best ion micrograph goes to....

[cfgauss]

Takayuki Hoshino & Shinji Matsui, Himeji Institute of Technology, for shrinking the enterprise to microscopic size without the aid of Q.

http://www.zyvexlabs.com/EIPBNuG/2003MicroGraph.html

 

Some other cool pictures, (too big for image tags)

Pollen,

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Misc_pollen.jpg

 

Snow flakes, which apparently look amazingly artificial on the ~1mm-.1mm size range

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:LT-SEM_snow_crystal_magnification_series-3.jpg

 

And a gold plated insect and spider,

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Golden_insect_01_Pengo.jpg

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Gold_Spider_SEM_sample.jpg

which I swear are gold plated for totally scientific reasons. Although IIRC the gold plating is only ~micrometers thick, and is used to increase contrast by increasing conductivity. And, yes, I'm absolutely sure once they're done with them they end up in someone's office, or some grad student makes some totally awesome jewelry for their girlfriend out of them .

 

I don't do science that typically produces fancy pictures (until we can take 11-dimensional pictures) so I have to be content with just looking at how awesome other science's stuff is!

[Randomizer]

"Why use lead if gold will do." - attributed to Lawrence Livermore Laboratories.