Highest resolution photos of snowflakes ever

December 20, 2020 7:04 PM

Former Microsoft CTO Nathan Myhrvold (previously) spent a year and a half building a custom 100-megapixel carbon-fiber super-cooled sapphire-lensed LED-lit super camera to take pictures of snowflakes. It turns out that taking pictures of snowflakes is hard. Really hard. Interview with Myhrvold about the project (transcript).
posted by ShooBoo (23 comments total)

Very cool.


(sorry!)
posted by tiamat at 7:22 PM on December 20, 2020 [2 favorites]

These things are goddamn ridiculous.
We get it, snowflakes. You’re better than us. Sheesh!
posted by Atom Eyes at 7:31 PM on December 20, 2020

Fun topic, but an article about fabulous high resolution photos that has nothing but three decidedly low resolution photos in it and no links to a proper source is frustrating. No slight on ShooBoo, a good post, but Forbes gets the side eye.

The most recent three images in Myhrvold's Modernist Cuisine collection were the best I could find and they aren't a lot better unless you want to buy a print.
posted by bcd at 7:37 PM on December 20, 2020 [4 favorites]

Each snowflake pictured here is a combination of between 100 to 500 stacked shots. Snowflakes have some depth to them — perhaps 10 microns — so you need to move your camera in and out slightly to capture all the detail in focus.

This confocal approach makes the technical challenge harder -- more light exposure is needed to take a stack of pictures, which equals more heat that deforms a fragile snowflake, so your rig has to be as quick as it is cool.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 7:38 PM on December 20, 2020

Two books of snowflake photos by Ken Libbrecht are among the coolest (!) I have. Found via MeFi. Turns out he was doing pretty well with analog photography 15 or so years ago.
posted by AbnerRavenwood at 8:16 PM on December 20, 2020

spent a year and a half building a custom 100-megapixel carbon-fiber super-cooled sapphire-lensed LED-lit super camera to take pictures of snowflakes

I wonder if he's familiar with the artist Alexey Kljatov (previously)? His set up is decidedly less sophisticated but the results are pretty good I'd say.
posted by Ashwagandha at 8:27 PM on December 20, 2020 [5 favorites]

Former Microsoft CTO World's most prolific patent troll Nathan Myhrvold

Drain billions from the economy with frivolous lawsuits, make snowflake pictures. Cool pictures I guess but also still fuck Nathan Myhrvold
posted by slagheap at 8:49 PM on December 20, 2020 [30 favorites]

I'm glad I'm not the only who who has negative reactions to being told about the adventures of billionaires who do things that an alternate universe me might have done if I had billions of dollars.
posted by JHarris at 1:11 AM on December 21, 2020 [3 favorites]

After the MacKenzie thread and now this one, I now know to never do anything at all in public if I become rich.
posted by LizBoBiz at 1:36 AM on December 21, 2020 [5 favorites]

There is no ethical way to become a billionaire. If you become one, you should feel bad about yourself. They don't, of course.
posted by stillnocturnal at 2:57 AM on December 21, 2020 [7 favorites]

Wilson “Snowflake” Bentley (previously) did a pretty good job photographing snowflakes with the equipment available a century ago. As far as I know he was not a malefactor of great wealth.
posted by TedW at 4:06 AM on December 21, 2020 [3 favorites]

"Wow, look at this one neat thing a monumental asshole did," is not a great start for a Metafilter post.

But if we get enough links to great snowflake photos by other people, it could be saved.
posted by seanmpuckett at 5:39 AM on December 21, 2020 [1 favorite]

There is no ethical way to become a billionaire. If you become one, you should feel bad about yourself. They don't, of course.

This one is only a hundred-millionaire though. It is very possible to become one of those ethically (he didn't though), unless buying a lottery ticket is unethical. Still, I'll keep all my rich-people-awesome adventures and discoveries to myself. :D
posted by LizBoBiz at 7:36 AM on December 21, 2020

Like TedW said:

http://www.nyheritage.org/collections/bentley-snow-crystal-collection

There are a ridiculous number of megapixels in a glass plate negative, if the focus is good.
posted by the Real Dan at 8:08 AM on December 21, 2020 [5 favorites]

unless buying a lottery ticket is unethical

Based on what happens to winners of such large prizes, I’d argue selling lottery tickets is unethical
posted by Cogito at 9:07 AM on December 21, 2020 [1 favorite]

Yeah I might have come across as too harsh above. Again, it's nothing against ShooBoo. The site's remit is "best of the web," not "best of the web not made by rich people."

But dear super anime mecha-Christ, ultra rich people are the cause of so many of our nation's, and the world's, problems.
posted by JHarris at 11:52 AM on December 21, 2020 [1 favorite]

(It's not hard to Google him up to find out about Nathan Myhrvold, here's an article in the Pacific Standard about his company.)
posted by JHarris at 11:56 AM on December 21, 2020

I now know to never do anything at all in public if I become rich.

Depending on how you become rich, it might be a good idea. Nathan Myhrvold is a polymath, an honest-to-god literal genius, and he used his unparalleled talents to build the world's largest completely legal extortion racket. And now there's a wave of articles over the last several months about his genius-level accomplishments in his hobbies that identify him as "Former CTO of Microsoft", a position he has not held for 20 years, instead of "Founder and co-owner of Intellectual Ventures", the company that everyone in the software industry pays semi-mandatory licensing fees to because the US patent office thought "store data on a server" and "click on a button to do something" were patentable ideas and Nathan bought 30,000 of those patents.

So yes, in the context of a novel approach to snowflake photography, it's worth mentioning how the money to pay for all the carbon fiber, pulse-fire LEDS, and sapphire lenses was acquired from the 21st century version of "nice place ya got here...", especially where it appears to be part of a low-key image-rehab PR push.

I'll see you again in the next thread about George W Bush's insights into watercolors vs acrylics.
posted by slagheap at 12:33 PM on December 21, 2020 [9 favorites]

Every time this guy shows up in the media I remember an interview where he laughed at computer industry people so afraid of Microsoft that they hid their badges on camera and insisted on anonymity to be interviewed.
posted by LastOfHisKind at 12:54 PM on December 21, 2020

The way that each snowflake arm is the same as other arms in the same snowflake has always felt like a form of spooky-action-at-a-distance to me.
posted by clawsoon at 3:30 PM on December 21, 2020 [1 favorite]

If you want to know why snowflakes are symmetrical: As a result, the water molecules arrange themselves in predetermined spaces and in a specific arrangement. This process is much like tiling a floor in accordance with a specific pattern: once the pattern is chosen and the first tiles are placed, then all the other tiles must go in predetermined spaces in order to maintain the pattern of symmetry. Water molecules simply arrange themselves to fit the spaces and maintain symmetry; in this way, the different arms of the snowflake are formed.
posted by ShooBoo at 4:04 PM on December 21, 2020 [4 favorites]

Our regional society has always had a problem for entertainment at our meetings. Sometimes we have music, but that's tricky, since tastes differ, and money is an issue. Sometimes we have (shudder) storytellers. But one time, we invited retired scientist William Wergin to show his pictures of snowflakes and explain the research behind them. He brought a bunch of 3-D glasses and showed three-dimensional photographs. That was, hands down, the best lecture we ever had.
posted by acrasis at 4:20 PM on December 21, 2020 [2 favorites]

Isn't this just a rich man cosplaying a Mind from an Iain M. Banks novel? I forget the name of the Mind though ...
posted by labberdasher at 1:31 PM on December 23, 2020