Snowflakes provide many of us with our earliest impressions of what it means to be unique. Even within a group—the flakes so ...

Wilson Bentley, a “bona-fide snowflake obsessive,” snapped close-ups of snowflakes in the late 1800s and early 1900s.

If humidity is low, there isn’t as much water vapour in the atmosphere so the snowflakes form something called 'plates', the flat hexagonal shapes you see if you look at them under a microscope.

...but these are freshly fallen snowflakes, or snow crystals, resting on wool. They are around 1 millimeter in size and were captured using a simple, cheap photography technique. When the snow ...