December was a month filled with holidays, and over on Instagram our microscope images captured some of the holiday spirit! As we share your favorite festive images featuring everything from diatoms to Brainbows, we want to take a moment to wish you all a happy and healthy New Year!

Will we find presents under this diatom tree? Diatoms are a type of plankton called phytoplankton. As the most common phytoplankton, diatoms are both an easily accessible and beautiful subject to image. This captivating diatom arrangement shaped as an evergreen tree is perfect for the holidays! 

Image courtesy of Waldo Nell.

These diatoms were collected from Sagami Bay, Japan, then arranged and imaged by the microscopist. Maybe it’s the cold December weather in New England, but we can’t help but see snowflakes when we see arrangements like these! 

Image courtesy of @co_micro. 

Flies don’t bug us! Rather than swat at a fly, we’d prefer to take a closer look at it. 

Captured by Jay Bird, these images of a fly do just that! Jay explains the images below: 

“Blue bottle portrait odds and ends. Proboscis. Some shots were left over from the house fly session. A proboscis from a different fly along with its eye and skin in extreme close-up. Strange, I imagined the blue bottle to have smooth blue/green skin but seeing it up close I found it's a blotchy mixture of pastel tones giving the overall appearance we see as shiny.”

Image and caption courtesy of Jay Bird. Captured using an Olympus BH2 microscope with a 10X objective.

This stunning (and somewhat spooky) image is a frequent favorite and won the global award in our 2020 Image of the Year competition. The image is a three-channel large-scale confocal image of a fixed and cleared rat embryo. Two channels show different autofluorescence sources of the tissue, while the third channel shows the skeleton stained by alizarin red.

To see the rest of our winners, or to submit your own image to our 2022 competition, visit our IOTY page.

Image courtesy of Werner Zuschratter, the 2020 Image of the Year global winner.

The Brainbow technique, visualized here, enables researchers to distinguish neighboring neurons and visualize brain circuits more easily. In the spirit of the season, it reminds us of brightly colored holiday lights.

Image courtesy of Dr. Katie Matho.