No Two Snowflakes Are Alike. No, Really!

Okay, there was this guy, see, and he really liked snow crystals. (We call them snowflakes since we're not cloud physicists.) He invented photomicrography, which is the use of photography to capture images from a microscope. And between 1880 and 1926 he made 5,000 photomicrographic plates of snow crystals, and 5,000 images of dew and frost. His name was Wilson Alwyn Bentley and you can now see some of his collection online at http://informatics.buffalo.edu/faculty/abbas/bms/ .

There are several items on the menu of this front page, but you should start out with Snow Crystals. You'll get a set of 154 crystals photographs to page through. The images are presented 20 at a time, with thumbnails and categorical information. Click on a thumbnail and you'll get a larger picture of the crystal, along with information about the crystal, plate number, and weather notes for when the flake was captured.

Some of the flakes are very basic -- triangles, hexagons, etc. But some of them are very intricate, fascinating to look at.

In addition to the flakes, this site also has pointers to information on photomicrography, how the collection was put together (big hand to Dr. June Abbas and the folks in the Digital Libraries course. Great work!) and information on Wilson Bentley himself. Excellent pictures.

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