Migrant Hawker - compound eye

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A close look at the compound eye of a Migrant Hawker photographed in the garden during the week. The individual cells you can see are called ommatidia. The more cells or ommatidia present, the greater insect's compound eye has to resolve images. With patience larger dragonflies can be approached to within millimetres which is what I did to get this close with a macro lense at hand. Compound images create an image from the mosaic created by the ommatidia. Perhaps to get an idea of what a dragonfly is seeing is to look at the enlarge pixels of a digital image in photoshop or paint. Just imagine each pixel is an individual ommatidia.