New Perspectives: From the Extremely Big to the Incredibly Small
To explore, we need to keep our senses open. By developing new “eyesˮ for both the very big and the very small, scientists have opened windows of discovery via technology, science, and engineering. A new collaboration celebrates this spirit of exploration from some of the worldʼs most powerful telescopes to the impact of high-powered modern microscopes.
This big versus small comparison lets us see the world and the universe around us like never before. It allows us to consider ideas like, what does the eye of a fruit fly have in common with the remains of an exploded star? What about a cell line and a planetary nebula? How do we capture images of things we canʼt see directly? The possibilities, to use a cliché, are infinite.
This fall, NASAʼs Chandra X-ray Observatory — the worldʼs premier telescope that detects X-rays from space — has worked with images from Nikon Small World, a free microscopy imaging competition, to celebrate the similarities and differences between the micro and the macro.
Microscopy is the study of what you can see through a microscope, and the Nikon Small World competition highlights the hidden beauty of the very tiny universe. Meanwhile, Chandra and other NASA telescopes, from the James Webb and Hubble Space Telescopes, and from Juno to Cassini, as well as telescopes from ESO and the NSF, have been capturing some of the largest objects in the universe through their unique telescopic eyes.
By pairing glimpses of these two worlds, we can explore the deep connections across scale — down from the smallest cells and out to the largest galaxies.
The Chandra X-ray Center has explored the concept of scale previously. Last year, The New York Times featured our “Micro/Macro” project and drew widespread interest. This new project builds on that foundation, highlighting fresh pairings of stunning microscopy images with NASA multiwavelength (that is, different kinds of light) images of the cosmos.
Seeing the Invisible: The Visual Language of Astronomy & Microscopy
Both microscopy and astrophysics rely on advanced imaging technologies to reveal structures our eyes alone could never see. They also wrestle with a similar challenge: how do we make the invisible visible? To understand either the big or the small, we must translate information into images that our eyes and brains can interpret. We magnify, measure scale, and often apply color to represent the data in specific ways. This begins the process of understanding the shared visual language that connects the microscopic and cosmic realms.
Tools for Exploring Hidden Worlds: Telescopes vs. Microscopes
At first glance, telescopes and microscopes may seem like opposites — one looks outward to distant galaxies, the other inward to tiny cells. Yet both are instruments designed to extend human capabilities, allowing us to detect light and structures well beyond the limits of our eyes.
Microscopes use lenses, light, or beams of electrons to magnify objects that are too small to see unaided. From the compound light microscope to powerful electron microscopes, each design helps reveal different levels of detail in the microscopic world.
Telescopes, on the other hand, are built to collect light in its many forms across enormous distances. They are often called “light buckets” for that reason. (While we typically think of light as what we can see with our eyes, there is actually a spectrum of light from radio waves to gamma rays.) Optical telescopes use mirrors and lenses to gather visible light, while observatories like NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory employ specialized detectors to capture forms of light — such as X-rays — that are invisible to the human eye.
Despite these differences, the underlying principle is the same: both microscopes and telescopes transform invisible or inaccessible information into images that deepen our understanding of the universe, whether inside a single organism or across cosmic scales.
Top: The orbiting Chandra X-ray Observatory provides high-resolution X-ray imaging of space. It is about the size of a school bus and weighs over 10,000 pounds. Bottom: Modern confocal microscopes are versatile imaging machines, delivering high-resolution 3D images of tissue and cells, and sometimes even single molecules, using visible light. Microscopes can range around 1-5 feet and a few dozen pounds. Note: these photos are not shown to scale.
Credits: Top: NASA/CXC/SAO; Bottom: Nikon
How do we think about and process information on scale? This fun comparison provides some perspective.
Left: A view of our Earth and Moon as photographed by NASA’s Galileo spacecraft en route to Jupiter in 1992. Right: Double exposure of rat hypothalamus showing locus of the mammalian biological clock, but note that the microscopic image has been intentionally cut in half to mimic the Earth and Moon views at left.
Credit...
Left: NASA/JPL-Caltech; Right: Dr. Wutian Wu, Eastern Virginia Medical School, Department of Anatomy & Neurobiology, Norfolk, Virginia, USA
MACRO OR MICRO? THINKING OF SCALE
One of the challenges in comparing the microscopic and cosmic worlds is scale. On Earth, we usually think about length in familiar units like feet, miles, or meters. We use objects that we are familiar with to compare those that we have never encountered before.
However, once we venture into extremes — the very small or the very large — our everyday landmarks are often no longer helpful. Scientists have developed different ways of measuring size and distance to help keep track of these scales that fall out of our common experiences. In astronomy, scientists use light years, the distance light travels in one year — about 10 trillion kilometers — to describe the enormous size and gigantic separation of stars, galaxies, and cosmic structures.
In microscopy, the reverse is true. To describe the dimensions of cells, bacteria, or even smaller structures, scientists use micrometers (a millionth of a meter) or nanometers (a billionth of a meter). These units let us quantify — and have a shared language — the hidden landscapes that exist beyond our unaided sight. Microscopy often requires similar techniques. Many microscopes also detect signals well beyond the type of light humans can detect with their eyes, whether through fluorescence, electron interactions, or other methods. Scientists apply color through staining, dyes, or digital mapping to highlight key structures or processes within a sample. Like in astronomy, these colors help reveal truths we would otherwise miss. The results are not only scientifically informative but also, hopefully, visually resonant, underscoring the connections between the universe inside us and the one beyond.
Which do you think is more extreme? Magnifying the very small or capturing the very big?
Mouse Embryos vs. Spiral Galaxy
Left: Four different views of an embryonic mouse in red, green, blue and composite in bottom right using confocal and 4X magnification. Right: M51 spiral interacting galaxy in four different types of light: optical from Hubble (green), X-rays from Chandra and ultraviolet from GALEX (blue), infrared from Spitzer (red) and composite in bottom right. Each image of M51 is about 52,000 across by 87,000 light years tall.
Credit...
Left: Dr. Carlo Donato Caiaffa de Carvalho, Dr. Richard Finnell, Dr. Bogdan Wlodarcyk, Dr. Linda Lin; Baylor College of Medicine, Center for Precision Environmental Health, Houston, Texas, USA; Right: X-ray: NASA/CXC/SAO; UV: NASA/JPL-Caltech; Optical: NASA/STScI; IR: NASA/JPL-Caltech; Image processing: NASA/CXC/SAO/K.Arcand, N.Wolk et al.
WORKING WITH COLOR
Another shared challenge in both astronomy and microscopy is how to represent data that human eyes cannot naturally see.
Chandra, for example, doesn’t capture images the way a handheld camera does. Instead, detectors record photons of X-ray light — invisible to us — as streams of 1s and 0s. Scientists then translate this data into an image, often assigning colors to represent characteristics such as intensity, energy, or chemical composition. These “representative colors” are not false or fake they are carefully chosen visual encodings that make the physics legible. It’s like color coding a weather map, but for your space images where the coding might be energy, wavelength, chemical abundance or topology.
Microscopy often requires similar techniques. Many microscopes also detect signals well beyond the type of light humans can detect with their eyes, whether through fluorescence, electron interactions, or other methods. Scientists apply color through staining, dyes, or digital mapping to highlight key structures or processes within a sample. Like in astronomy, these colors help reveal truths we would otherwise miss.
The results are not only scientifically informative but also, hopefully, visually resonant, underscoring the connections between the universe inside us and the one beyond.
How would you color your data of the inner or outer universe?
Agate vs. Turbulence on Jupiter
Left: Polished slab of Teepee Canyon agate using stereomicroscopy with 90x magnification. Right: Color maps in optical light of Jupiter constructed from multiple images during a flyby of NASA's Cassini spacecraft on Dec. 11 and 12, 2000. The smallest visible features are about 120 kilometers (75 miles) across.
Left: University of Wisconsin — Stevens Point/Museum of Natural History/Douglas Moore; Right: NASA/JPL/Space Science InstituteCredit...
PATTERN, STRUCTURE, SHAPE
Science often reminds us that patterns repeat across scales, and structures and shapes can look similar. Whether it’s the branching of blood vessels that echoes the filaments of galaxies, or the cellular structures that resemble the remnants of supernovae, these visual echoes underscore our shared universe. By looking closely at both the very small and the very large, we gain a deeper appreciation for the complexity — and beauty — of the cosmos and of life itself.
Where else do you find patterns in your world?
Join the Journey from the Big to the Small
We invite you to follow along as we roll out this new series of micro/macro comparisons. Follow Chandra on Instagram, Facebook, & X and Nikon Small World on their social media channels (LinkedIn / Instagram / Facebook / X) to see the newest image pairings, and challenge yourself to guess: are you looking at the universe inside us, or the universe beyond?
For over a quarter of a century, the Chandra X-ray Observatory, operated by the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory on behalf of NASA, has been sending spectacular views of the X-ray universe back to Earth.
Resources
Activities:
Micro/macro hands on activity sheet
Try a sorting activity on scale
Do it yourself: processing data (digital or paper/pencil)
Learn More:
X-ray Imaging 101
Coloring & Coding a black hole
What is representative or "false" color?
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