Would you like to get small, really small?

I do some macro type work, I like to see my images larger than life size. A friend of mine, John Notte, has me way trumped in that department though. He's a research scientist for Carl Ziess, (Zeiss makes my Hasselblad lenses...) developing the "Orion Hellium Ion Microscope" to see really really small things. Think atomic level. Very cool and important work. He recently sent me some pictures, which I liked as abstract images; knowing what they are takes it to another place though - included in italics is his technical description. 

These 4 pictures came about after we were discussing sparklers around 4th of July...

"I had incidentally mentioned that the smoke from the sparklers burns into magnesium oxide which often has an amazingly perfect cubical form.  Here are some helium ion microscope images of the smoke that we made at the office a couple of years ago.  They are cubical because the Mg and the O atoms like to arrange themselves in an alternating pattern:  Mg atoms like to have O atoms for neighbors.  The O atoms like to have Mg atoms for neighbors.   And when they are hot, they have enough mobility to meander around until they come to their favorite positions, and then they cool off, and can no longer move.  Think of it like musical chairs.  In some cases, when the angle is just right you can see the crystal becomes almost transparent because all the atoms are lined up and our helium ions shoot right through.    Most of these images are projection images, really just showing the silhouette - but enough to convince us that they are cubical. "