Electron Microscope

Where the beam hits, the surface gives off low-energy electrons, and a detector counts them, point by point, into a gray picture. More escape where the beam meets the surface at a slant, so edges and spines glow, and the side facing away from the detector falls into shadow. It can show things far smaller than light can: pollen grains a few hundredths of a millimeter across, the rows of tiny pores in a diatom's glass shell, or the frozen droplets on a snowflake (snow is imaged cold, in a special stage).

The samples here are built for the splash in a microscope's grays. Tap any grain, shell, or crystal to zoom in from the whole field to it, then to its surface. Vision in the Splash tab recolors the picture: the realistic gray, a night-vision scope's green, or an infrared camera's colors (for fun: an electron microscope sees no color).