Each year, a number of photography competitions touch on science. My favorite one of the lot is always Nikon's Small World Photomicrography Contest. The results of this year's contest were released earlier this week, and once again they are truly spectacular.

There's no one reason that I find these images compelling—instead, there is a large collection of reasons. One of them is that the images force you to see things you thought were familiar (and perhaps even boring) in an entirely new way. Take these images of plants, for example.

Depending on the sample and preparation, the images evoke works of art, horror movie props, or alien beings. In short, they look like anything but plants, even after you know that's what you're staring at.

Many of the inanimate materials that have been imaged are equally foreign, even if they're things (LCDs, cell phones) that are part of our daily lives. Microscopy reminds us that the every-day experience of our visual world is only a small slice of reality—even if it's a reality that we ourselves have made.

And, of course, the reality that we've made has nothing on what billions of years of evolution have produced. The vast diversity of life involves countless unfamiliar animals, some of which may inhabit the same environment that we do, but slip by undetected. In other cases, the animal may be familiar, but microscopy reveals detail—the wing of a moth, the hair of a beetle—that otherwise escapes our senses.

The last thing I love about the contest is how it reveals how the line between science and art can get rather blurry. Artists may agonize over getting every detail perfect, but scientists do as well. A month of sample preparation can end in results that are mostly disappointing—awkward folds or distortions, failed fluorescent tags, or some other technical disaster. Getting something just right, then capturing it in a way that preserves its perfection, is a rarity.

And then there's microscopy itself. There's a huge collection of entirely different techniques that can produce radically different images from the same sample. And a good microscope has more dials and knobs to fiddle with than all but the highest-end cameras. All of which provides a mind-blowing number of options for capturing the sample, each of which can reveal something distinctive about it. The choice of options by microscopists can be as much aesthetic as scientific.

Finally, there's the technology angle. A number of images here couldn't possibly have been produced a few decades ago. Fluorescent proteins, sub-diffraction limit imaging, and computer data processing all add entirely new options for imaging—they update the catalog of what's possible.