Hard X-rays can penetrate solid objects, and their most common use is to take images of the inside of objects in diagnostic radiography and crystallography. As a result, the term X-ray is metonymically used to refer to a radiographic image produced using this method, in addition to the method itself. By contrast, soft X-rays hardly penetrate matter at all; the attenuation length of 600 eV (~2 nm) X-rays in water is less than 1 micrometer.
