Nanoscapes

Overview

Making the invisible, visible! Images of butterfly wings at the microscopic scale are stunning, and at the nanoscopic scale they become otherworldly. The colorful images in the animated short Nanoscapes were taken with light and electron microscopes at magnifications up to 50,000x. From iridescent blues to vivid greens, butterflies produce colors by modulating how light is reflected from their wings. In other words, pigments are not the whole color story. Some color comes from intricate nano structures, and different organisms have evolved unique approaches to this phenomenon, called structural coloration. So a blue butterfly wing is not blue, but appears blue when tiny ridges bounce light in a way that adds together the amplitudes that make the wing appear blue.