October 2005 marks 50 years since the first images achieving atomic resolution were obtained by Erwin Miiller and Kanwar Bahadur at the Pennsylvania State University using field ion microscopy. An image from that seminal work is shown in Figure 1. Two separate meetings were held this year to commemorate this important event in the history of microscopy; the 50th Anniversary of Atomic Resolution Microscopy, held June 15-17, 2005 at Penn State and the Golden Anniversary of Atomic Resolution Imaging, a symposium at Microscopy and Microanalysis 2005 in Honolulu held July 31 to August 4, 2005. These celebrations were timed to coincide also with the World Year of Physics 2005 http://www. wyp2005.org/.