Friday 20 November 2020

As We Walked Home Last Night,

we both remarked how much colder it was than the night before,


it has to said that Diana loves the cold, so the question is will we have snow here this winter? so I took a look at some snow crystals, all, of these stunning photographs © Nathan Myhrvold,

there is always a debate when talking about snow crystals, with many people stating that no two snow crystals are exactly the same,

and they are correct, the scientific consensus states that the likelihood of two large snow crystals being identical is zero, even though each winter there are about 1 septillion (1, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000 or a trillion trillion) snow crystals that drop from the sky!

back to the photographs, Nathan Myhrvold, the Seattle-born photographer travelled to Fairbanks, Alaska, and Yellowknife, Northwest Territories, Canada, where temperatures plunged to –20 °F. “Water, an incredibly familiar thing to all of us, is quite unfamiliar when you see it in this different view. The intricate beauty of snowflakes is derived from their crystal structure, which is a direct reflection of the microscopic aspects of the water molecule,” he says,

formally trained in physics, Myhrvold spent 18 months building a custom camera with a cooled-stage microscope to ensure that the flakes remained frozen as he shot. Short-pulse, high-speed LED lights reduce the heat the instrument emits, and at a minimum, its shutter speed clocks in at 500 microseconds. Myhrvold says it’s the highest-resolution snowflake camera in existence, as an aside the scientific consensus and figures I quoted are from the Library of Congress.


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