I think your nose feels it right. 😁 And yes advanced microscopes are now used to produce super high res images of the virus. Years back I wrote a post in steemstem about using single particle Cryo-electron microscope to image Zika virus with resolution on Armstrong range. It was based on this cell paper, if you want to look at the images. I got a chance to prepare sample for cryo-EM back in 2020 when one of the drug we were testing appeared to cause aggregation of virus particles. Now that wasnt some super high res image, but I could clearly see the spikes of CoV2 protuding out of a sphere of about 100nm.
Other than cryo-EM Xray-diffraction is common method to get atomic structure of viruses. But that work best with viruses you can crystalize.
Even the popular nanoscience tool - atomic force microscope is also used. Check out some AFM inages of the virus in this paper. What I find cool about AFM is that it can show you viruses entering in or budding out of the cells.
Ahaha I totally miss this post! The image you shared is great (and the comments to the post are hilarious; yeah the good old times). Also, thanks for the papers. They have really nice images (I only checked out the pics; I didn't read the text).
Cheers!