Snow is a part of geology, too. It packs pockets in the mountains to form glaciers. The seasonal freezing and thawing allows water to sleep into cracks in rocks and wedge them apart. Earth science includes the study of the solid, liquid and gaseous parts of our planet and they all cooperate to make Earth what it is.
This time, I did a common science hobby activity that I've never done before. I tried first on February 1, when the snow was first packing in, but it was a very fine dust with very little crystal development. On the second day, there were big flakes and I got these photographs.
I took them with a clip-on microscope lens for a smartphone. It has a built-in LED illuminator, which explains the glare. After cropping and sharpening the images, I ended up with these images.
To get the photographs, I caught the flakes on a slide that I had left in our freezer overnight and used the smartphone camera with microscope lens, hand-held, to capture the images. It was quick and sloppy work but easy.
The flakes themselves were from a single sample. Had I spent a lot more time catching more I could have likely come up with better examples, but these are quite good enough to show the varied hexagonal nature of ice.
When taking pictures of snowflakes, the surface you use (in this case, a plastic microscope slide) must be below freezing or the flakes will melt as soon as they land on it. Also, don't use a hot light source like a hot incandescent lamp to illuminate the slide, and don't breathe on the flakes.
Of course, an actual microscope would give you better results, but the scope should also be chilled, perhaps by leaving it for an hour in the place where you will be photographing, and in humid environments, protect the instrument from condensation (cover it and use an eyepiece cap until you're ready to shoot).
If you use a smartphone camera, you might be able to use a gooseneck camera holder and phone clamp to steady the phone.
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