Today's photos are closeups of snowflakes. They were all taken this year, most within the past couple of days. I thought it was only fitting to post them to remind people of how beautiful snow really is as we prepare for a massive nor'easter here in Maine tonight and tomorrow.

Someone mentioned to me the other day that they were surprised that snowflakes are clear like ice. Well, there is a good reason for that. Snowflakes are ice crystals and aren't really white at all. Snow looks white because the the ice does not absorb any color of light rays and reflects them all equally, explains Snow Crystals. When light enters a pile of snow, it bounces around from flake to flake and reflects all the colors of light. Objects that reflect all the light rays appear white to the eye.

According to Professor Verlinde at Penn State University, there are approximately 5.2 quintillion (5,179,976,221,000,000,000) "pea-size" snowflakes in a snowstorm that deposits 5 inches of snow over a 2,000 square mile area. I'll let you do the math to determine how many snowflakes it takes to cover the State of Maine with 2 feet of snow.

If you are mathematically minded, we'd love to hear from you.  Feel free to calculate it for us and leave your answer in the comments!

Today's slideshow contains snowflakes in varying stages. The first two images are of tiny snowflakes just beginning to form. You can see both plates and columns that make up the structure of a snowflake. To the naked eye, these 'snowflakes' look like small specks of ice. The third and fourth photo are of small snowflakes that have already formed. These snowflakes often fall in clumps (called aggregate snowflakes) and look like huge snowflakes falling to the ground, but they are really groups of snowflakes that stick together and fall together. The final photo is a fully-formed snowflake. These are the snowflakes you see sparkling on top of the snow.

​According to About Education, typical snowflakes range in size from the width of a human hair to nearly the size of a penny. Some reports claim that individual snowflakes can be as large as 3 to 4 inches across. One eye witness from Fort Keogh, Montana in January 1887, claims to have measured an aggregate snowflake that was 15 inches across. 

The size and shape of a snowflake depends on the temperature in the clouds and the humidity level in the air. Generally, high humidity and low temperatures cause intricate or elaborate snowflakes to form. In the photos above, the small snowflakes fell at the beginning of the storm and the fully-formed snowflakes fell later in the day as the temps outside dropped.

If you are interested in how snowflakes form and grow, check out Snow Crystals. It provides several videos of snowflakes as they form. The snowflakes in the videos have been grown and filmed in a lab.

If you found this information interesting and like the photos, don't forget to share it with your friends or to leave me a comment. 

Today's photo is a shot of a snowflake placed on a blue background. The snowflake was cleaned up in Photoshop to repair one of the broken branches and then cut out and placed on a blue background to make the details of the snowflake more visible. This snowflake is called a stellar dendrite snowflake. It has a small plate star attached to the lower left branch.

Today's photo is a solitary snowflake dangling from the edge of a the snow on my birdfeeder. This image picked up the soft blues from the snow and shadows in the background. According to CalTech, this type of snowflake is the most common and is easily visible with the naked eye. It is called a Stellar Dendrite Snowflake. Dendrite comes from the Greek, meaning "tree-like" describing the branching formation of this snowflake. This is the classic shape that many people associate with snowflakes, but snowflakes come in many shapes and sizes.