Snowflakes

During the winter I had a go at storing a snowflake. The idea is you let some freshly fallen snow fall onto some superglue which is on a glass slide, then put the lot into the freezer for a week or two. The glue sets in the freezer trapping the snowflake inside.

[This is from a book whose title escapes me at the moment, I’ll look it up in a bit]

Amazingly this works and I now have some slides with snowflakes in them. Or at least I think I do because I don’t have a microscope with which to look at them.

But I have had a go at the ‘CD macro lens’ hack. See here for details . So armed with a small lens, a Samsung cell phone and a small piece of paper I went searching for your traditional hexagon shaped snowflake.

Now the photos don’t come out as well as the ones on the website, but this is recognizably a snowflake.

Snowflake #1

Snowflake #2

The focus issue is because I didn’t squish the superglue enough so it is about 2mm high which gives quite a bit of depth.

I was reading about hacking a web cam into a macro lens too, I should try that.