Interference

Soap bubbles glimmer with light waves reflected from the back and front surfaces of the bubbles as they interfere with one another, thus concentrating the light to give a dynamic rainbow color appearance.[OPN 2024 Photo Contest Second Place Tie]

—Sritam Kumar Sethy, M.pharma Student, Balasore, Odisha, India      

01 Dec 2024

Repairing Skull Bone

 Featured is a section of mouse calvarial bone days after injury imaged through Second-Harmonic Generation microscopy by laser stimulation at the 810 nm wavelength peak, revealing changes in collagen organization and tissue remodeling. Autofluorescence is displayed in blue and fibrillar collagen in green.[OPN 2024 Photo Contest Second Place Tie]

—Maria Alice Paularie, LabNS, Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais (UFMG), Belo Horizonte, Brazil

01 Dec 2024

Glass into Glass  

 A 405 nm laser purchased from Amazon and made in China is shone through a Ramune drink marble ball, which focuses the beam into a glass table. The yellow and green fluorescent responses likely arise from dopants such as uranium, manganese, cadmium or other elements/molecules in the glasses excited by the near-UV emission.[OPN 2024 Photo Contest Third Place Tie]

—Michael A. Gachich, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Champaign, IL, USA

01 Dec 2024

Scatterguiding

 "Energy transport in diffusive waveguides (Nature Physics, 2024) light can propagate as a true waveguiding mode through diffusive materials, such as fog, tissue and resin (pictured). This is analogous to optical fibers, except the mechanism is diffusion using a contrast of scattering parameters to create localization. Image taken with a Nikon D750 using three colored diode lasers.[OPN 2024 Photo Contest Third Place Tie] "

—Kevin J. Mitchell, University of Glasgow, UK

01 Dec 2024

Golden Projection

A forgotten glass of ginger juice solving a geometrical problem. Ginger sediment has dried and cracked; illuminated from the bottom, the crack pattern is projected on the curved glass walls, forming swirly motifs. The black background was made in post-processing.[OPN 2024 Photo Contest Honorable Mention]

—Sofia Magkiriadou, University of Fribourg, Switzerland

01 Dec 2024

Eclipse with Solar Flares

 This image was taken seconds before the end of totality for the 2024 North American solar eclipse. The solar flares and prominences are clearly visible in the image. And if you look closely, you can see the irregular contour of the limb of the moon illuminated by the solar corona, which is the source of bright spots called Baily's Beads. The main optic was a 500 mm f/5.6 prime telephoto lens. The lens uses a diffractive optic to help control chromatic aberrations. I also added a 1.4x teleconverter to give the lens combination a focal length of 700 mm.[OPN 2023 Photo Contest Honorable Mention]

—James Robert Leger, University of Minnesota, Plymouth, MN, USA   

01 Dec 2024

3D printed lenses by 2GL

This image shows a close-up of a microendoscope's stacked lens system. The SEM image highlights the freeform top lens and the central hybrid lens, which features a diffractive element. The supports have a matte texture for stray light management. The microendoscope's lenses were produced using 3D printing by 2GL®, a voxel tuning-based process that enables high-speed 3D printing without the need for slicing steps to create optically smooth surfaces and precise sharp edges in the shortest possible time.[OPN 2024 Photo Contest Honorable Mention]    

—Andrea Bertoncini, Eggenstein-Leopoldshafen, Germany

01 Dec 2024

Salt Crystal Fluorescence

Fluorescence from KCl and MgCl2 crystals as Alexa 488 dye dries on a coverslip (Pseudocolor image).[OPN 2024 Photo Contest Honorable Mention]

—Siddharth Rawat, UNSW Sydney, Sydney, Australia

01 Dec 2024

Mount SEM

 At first glance, "Mount SEM" mimics the majestic silhouette of a mountain range, with towering peaks blanketed by snow. However, the true essence of this image lies in the microscopic view of the edge of an aluminum mirror designed for space applications, captured under a Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM) at high magnification.

—Hassan Shirzadi at Micro-Lam Inc., Kalamazoo, Michigan, USA 

01 Dec 2024