Macrofocus timelapse video of snowflake formation

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I’m really amaze how snowflake’s formed.

Avril 14th wouldn’t have been my first choice for this.

I just happened to be listening to Pink Floyd’s Animals when I clicked your link…

I just tried watching it to Vordhosbn instead, much better :slight_smile:

Any idea how this is captured? How would one initiate snowflake growth in a way that you can capture it on camera like this?

I’m into words; and photography.
What does ‘macrofocus’ mean?
Yes, I googled it for me…

I too have a lot of questions.

My guess is that we are watching snow flakes melt, but played back in reverse.

I was wondering the same thing.
Does he just mean in focus with a macro lens, or is there something special going on here?

You’d set up laboratory conditions similar to the conditions under which snowflakes form in nature – temperatures below freezing and air supersaturated with water vapor. You’d probably provide a nucleus to start the crystal forming – maybe a piece of dust or similar. You’d set this all up in a chamber with a microscope aimed at it, then take a bunch of still microscope images and put them together into a time-lapse.

Actually, upon further searching, a lab at Cal Tech grows snowflakes and makes videos of snowflake formation, and they have a really nice page about their experimental setup.

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I have always wondered how snowflakes stay symmetrical.
It would seem that by the time the arms got very far off from the center of the flake, small differences in the way molecules lay one after the other, would make each section very different from another.
Do the way the first ~30 molecules situate themselves constrain absolutely everything afterwords?

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I came to the comment section to say just this :slight_smile:

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