Copepod up close

This image of a tiny crustacean called a copepod is one of the winners of this year's Nikon Small World photography competition. At Deep Sea News, blogger ParaSight explains how the photographer, scientist Jan Michels, got the shot:

That right there is one gorgeous copepod, one of the bigger and more important groups of planktonic crustaceans. It looks huge but is actually tiny; probably 1-2mm. You can see how much richer and more detailed the image is (although the colour is stained flouresence, not natural). That particular image uses a technique called confocal microscopy, which uses lasers and clever optics to achieve great depth of field (where everything is in focus).

Maggie Koerth-Baker is the science editor at BoingBoing.net. She writes a monthly column for The New York Times Magazine and is the author of Before the Lights Go Out, a book about electricity, infrastructure, and the future of energy. You can find Maggie on Twitter and Facebook.

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MORE: contest • microscopy • photography • Science • tiny life

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Okapi

confocal≈camera obscura
Guest

Is this taken by one of the Shriners in the tiny mustangs?
Lobster

Reaver, online.
http://www.jjsaul.com Jim Saul

Intrigued enough to look into the technique, I just found that confocal imaging was invented by Marvin Minsky!

Is there any award out there specifically recognizing the kinds of genius who contribute to such wide ranging disciplines?
http://pulse.yahoo.com/_6LOJDBXCDHL5MVQQRLOCCJ35AY alexb

@boingboing-f204c21f5f6da3c74892735f505e7858:disqus , nope. Go look it up.
@ Jim Saul, the Nobel prize for physics is often to given to inventors or discoverers of founding principles or inventions which contribute to this type of instrumentation.
- http://www.jjsaul.com Jim Saul
  
  That makes sense, since they are giving the world tools with which to make so many other discoveries. What I meant specifically in this case was that I was surprised to see Minsky’s name, since I only knew of his groundbreaking work in AI and cognitive theory.
jtegnell

Anyone with a healthy reef aquarium has tons of these little guys crawling around. Usually they’re white.
DiabloD3

Hey, isn’t that the ship from Homeworld?