"The researchers didn't get an image of an atom" You could say the same about any image produced by a scientific instrument these days. Any astronomical image

"The researchers didn't get an image of an atom" You could say the same about any image produced by a scientific instrument these days. Any astronomical image has a huge amount of data behind it, but we don't sit around saying "gee, there are no actual images, isn't that a shame". If you don't want to call something an image, you can call it a diagram produced by a data processing program, but whatever you call it, it's disappointing if it's not provided.