Welcome to the 2020 Sigma Xi STEM Art exhibition: 

Macro or Micro ?  

Challenging Our Perceptions of Scale!

 Through the intermingling of earth and life imagery generated via both satellite and electron microscope, this body of work reveals patterns and similarities in the natural world between scales that are undetectable by the naked eye. 

Dr. Stephen Young (Salem State University) uses satellite imagery to study environmental change on earth and his colleague, Dr. Paul Kelly (Salem State University), uses the electron microscope to explore the details of living organisms and earth objects.  In this on-line exhibition, the micro images capture details which are millimeters or less in size while the macro images capture details which are kilometers or larger in size.  Thus the difference in scale is a million times or more.

In the following pages we present 47 images and we ask you to determine if you think they are macro (satellite) or micro (electron microscope) images, you can even take a guess at what you think you are looking at. The images have been processed scientifically as they would be for a publication, not to fool you. 

We provide a down-loadable guessing sheet if you want to take the challenge!  The images can be found in the following pagers as we have organized them in a variety of ways, from two images where one is macro and the other micro, to a collage of macro and micro images. Each are numbered and at the end we provide the answers. At the end we also provide links to other Macro or Micro? related pages from other exhibitions. 

ENJOY!    Good Luck!

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Down-loadable guessing sheet.

Artists / Scientists:

Stephen Young (Geography & Sustainability) 

and  Paul Kelly (Biology)

Salem State University

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Page Created - July 2020