Snowflake Photographer

(Inside Science) -- Snowflakes. They are beautiful and fragile -- and very difficult to photograph. But that didn’t stop one scientist from trying.

Can you imagine how hard it would be to photograph a teeny-tiny, individual snowflake crystal? Then imagine the challenges that Wilson Bentley faced back in the late 1800s and early 1900s.

"Wilson Bentley pioneered in photographing snow crystals, snowflakes and raindrops. He was a farmer by trade and a scientist by passion," said Terry Nathan, an atmospheric scientist at the University of California, Davis.

"When snowflakes are falling by the billions from clouds, through photography, we can freeze that motion, understand how fast it’s falling, how those snowflakes might be connected to the cloud itself and the nature of the storm. Photography allows us to see things that are beyond normal human vision," said Nathan.

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[TheStockwell]

Bentley's a hero of mine. I moved to Vermont in 2012 and discovered his hometown, Jericho, is a ninety-minute drive from where I live. He never copyrighted his photos and because of him, we have the image of the six-sided snowflake.

He didn't invent the snowflake, but he promoted his work so much that his images are the ones virtually everyone sees every time they buy a holiday card, cold weather gear, or any other item with a snowflake on it.

He died in 1931 from pneumonia he caught in after walking home in a blizzard from the Jericho train station. He was 67, done in by the thing he loved most - ironic, but sort of appropriate.

[philbox]

That's how life began in the clouds, it's like plants. Life was synthetized in the clouds after the creation of Earth. Life need a cycle of cold and heath to be created and to evolve correctly. Earth is too perfect for it. It is not random, it look like extreme calculations and precision in all things.

[christianming]

Reminds us that God created all beautiful and complex.

[ummetimuhemmed]

Praise be to God Almighty, who created snowflakes carefully🤲🏻