SNOWFLAKES Too hot to Handle

Trying to take a photograph of some snowflakes. The problem is that the camera although feeling cold was still just too hot when brought near the snow flakes, because it caused them to melt. I tried to be quick and used different cameras to see the flakes.

I tried a microscope adaptor on the phone, but this nearly had the touch the flakes to get the imagine in focus, but even cooling the adaptor in snow for several minutes, the flakes melting within a few seconds.

I had more luck with the Olympus camera set in macro focus stacking mode. The flakes are very small and these were taken on my car.

Snowflakes are as most children know are regular but unique six-sided shapes - but more than that they are 3_D shapes that only when they fall make the 6-sided snow flake shape.

There are many types of snow and really cold snow (as opposed to the stuff which is about at zero degrees Celcius) seems to make better snow-flakes. These are smaller at usually more compacted in shape. Water molecules when in the solid state, such as in ice and snow, form very weak bonds (called hydrogen bonds) to one another. These ordered arrangements result in the basic symmetrical hexagonal shape we call the snowflake.
There really is no such thing as the perfect snowflake. Many children like to draw or cut out snowflakes that are regular patterns, but as the ice crystals form in the clouds they are buffeted by each other knocking off bits and then refreezing to get other shapes. Each of the "arms" of a snow flake forms uniquely and independently of all the others. These snow-flakes are like fractals - the closer you look at them the more structure you see.
So why then if the sides are all different , why do they appear to be the same on one snow flake? They aren't - but because all of the snowflake was formed in the same place in the cloud under the same conditions then each snowflake is more or less the same. The snowflake grows as it moves up and down in the clouds and as it get too large to be supported by the atmosphere it falls and usually loses some of its shape by melting, or by collision. So most of the snowflakes that you see are only parts of snow flakes, arms broken off in their flight down to Earth.

If you look very closely at falling snow or at some of my photographs taken in very light snowfall, you can see a great many different crystal shapes.  There's a lot more to see than you might think! The Bond angle in water to another water molecule is around 120 degrees – it’s the nearest sensible shape – so everything 120 degree apart gives us six sided shapes.

Thera are seven main shapes.

Simple Prisms
A hexagonal prism is the simplest and the most basic snow crystal shape. Depending on how fast the different faces grow, snow crystal can make anything from long columns to thin hexagonal plates, these are often way too small to see with the naked eye. Simple prisms are usually so small they can barely be seen with the naked eye.

Stellar Plates
These common snowflakes are these thin hexagon plates with six broad arms that form a star-like shape. These usually form when the temperature is near -2 C.

Sectored Plates
These are stellar plates with ridges that point to the corners between adjacent prism faces.  If these ridges are easy to be seen, then these crystals are called sectored plates.