High-Speed Camera Grabs First 3D Shots of Untouched Snowflakes

sciencehabit writes "Researchers have developed a camera system that shoots untouched flakes 'in the wild' as they fall from the sky. By grabbing a series of images of the tumbling crystals—its exposure time is one-40,000th of a second, compared with about one-200th in normal photography—the camera is revealing the true shape diversity of snowflakes. Besides providing beautiful real-time 3D snowflake photographs from a ski resort in Utah, the goal is to improve weather modeling. More accurate data on how fast snowflakes fall and how their shapes interacts with radar will improve predictions of when and where storms will dump snow and how much."

Comments

Meanwhile, on the internet

[girlintraining]

...Moments later, the pictures were uploaded to Instagram with a vintage filter, and ceased being cool.

Re:Meanwhile, on the internet

[girlintraining]

And then Mark Zuckerberg formed a new polical lobby for Snow Flake Preservation.

Zynga then promptly released a game where you can buy virtual snowflakes to drop on your farms, but was sued by Apple for patent infringment over it's slide-to-drop snowflake technology. Microsoft released a snowflake player called 'Snune', but was widely panned by critics as being inferior to all other offers. A few weeks later, it quietly disappeared. Regular slashdot readers blamed stagnancy in cloud technologies for the lack of high performance snow, and girlintraining continued to snark the crap out of everything she comes across...

Re:Did the Penny Drop!

[KitFox]

Previous Story: "Show me the money"

This story: "Here's the snowflakes! And the money."

Just in case this page gets updated and the penny gets bumped off, hopefully the direct link to the beautiful high-speed photo of a falling penny will persist in the records and the annals of time forever.

Re:Did the Penny Drop!

[ackthpt]

It's certainly an unusual shape for a snowflake untouched by human hands.

And just the other day I was looking a photograph of snowflakes caught on felt, which left them unaffected.

Sometimes you don't need uber technology, but the creativity of a person on a very limited budget.

Re:Nice pictures

[Dahamma]

Analogy fail. You must live somewhere warm... hate to break it to you, but snowflakes are real ;)

Don Komarechka

[Flammon]

I have a cousin who's writing a book on this.

http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/sky-crystals-unraveling-the-mysteries-of-snowflakes

why are snowflakes symmetric?

[The_Rook]

what i've always wanted to know was why are snowflakes symmetric?

sure, a hexagonal crystal has bilateral symmetry etc. but snowflakes form long, complex arms with what can best be described as filigree. and yet, the filigree on opposite sides of the snowflake are also symmetric - that's shown even in these photos.

so what i want to know is how does crystal faces on opposite sides of the snowflake 'know' to grow symmetric filligree? what mechanism is there that allows one crystal face of a snowflake to 'know' what the other crystal faces are doing and so grow identical structures?

Re:why are snowflakes symmetric?

[exploder]

I think it's because (snowflakes being quite small) all sides experience nearly identical conditions of temperature, humidity, whatever-else-affects-crystal-growth at nearly identical times.

Re:why are snowflakes symmetric?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think it's because (snowflakes being quite small) all sides experience nearly identical conditions of temperature, humidity, whatever-else-affects-crystal-growth at nearly identical times.

I'm a cloud physicist and you, sir, are correct, identifying not only the reason for the symmetry (uniform conditions across the crystal over relevant time scales) but also the two controlling factors of temperature and humidity (well, humidity above saturation). Well done. Let me buy you a virtual beer.

The diversity of shapes is what's really cool. As far as I know (and this isn't my area) we have a phenomonology for habit (we know what shapes are most likely at a given temperature and humidity, for example) but we don't have a good theory to explain why that's so.

Re:why are snowflakes symmetric?

[pspahn]

Can't remember the name specifically, it is almost exactly at 39.518712, -106.629701

There are some yurts just to the west about a 1/4 mile. I suggest staying there (Hidden Treasure Yurts) and reading the great binder full of information on local caves. I read the article about this specific cave, and it's quite fascinating.

If caving in Colorado, please educate yourself on White Nose Syndrome. It is not prevalent here, and people would like to keep it that way.

Bad summary

[TrumpetPower!]

First, 1/200s is a very common shutter speed, yes, but most cameras can shoot at at least 1/2000s and most high-end cameras can shoot at 1/8000s...assuming, of course, you have enough light.

Most high-speed stills photography is actually done with a slow shutter speed; perhaps even a shutter left open for a couple seconds. Motion is stopped by the short duration of the flash burst. And with, for example, a Canon 580 EX II flash, you can get a 1/35,000s flash duration. Granted, this will be at minimum power...but they're operating at macro distances, where you can put the flash head almost on top of your subject and still overpower the subject with light.

Don't get me worng; this team is doing some nifty stuff. But it's also something that most professional photographers could easily replicate with the equipment they already have -- and that anybody who specializes in macro photography will probably already plan on playing around with next winter after reading this article.

What the team is doing that's interesting isn't the photography. It's the 3D reconstruction and subsequent analysis and modeling. Making it seem that it's about the photography, which is the easy and inconsequential part, really detracts from the good stuff.

Cheers,

b&

Re:Bad summary

[rgmoore]

The trick is that the shutter isn't doing the work; the flash is. It's possible to make very short flash pulses; I think you can make them even shorter than the 1/50,000 second mentioned in the article. As long as most of the light for the photograph comes from the brief but intense flash, the ability to freeze action depends on the flash speed rather than the shutter speed. You actually need to make sure the shutter speed is slow enough that the shutter is guaranteed to be all the way open when the flash triggers (X-sync speed or slower), or only the area behind the open part of the shutter will be exposed. Controlling things using the flash also guarantees that the multiple cameras used for 3D photography will all be taking their pictures at exactly the same instant.

Also note that the limitation you're talking about only applies to focal plane shutters (i.e. those right in front of the film or sensor). It's also possible to use a central shutter that's located right next to the iris of the lens. Central shutters open and close like the lens aperture, but block the lens completely when they're closed. Like the lens aperture, they block light to all parts of the focal plane more or less equally as they open and close, so they don't induce any of the motion effects that focal plane shutters do. Central shutters have their own problems- it's hard to make them work for very short shutter speeds, and they have limited efficiency when you use them that way because they're only completely open for part of the time- but they do eliminate focal plane shutter artifacts and allow you to flash sync at any available shutter speed.

Still facsinating

[Ogive17]

I'm 33 and on occasion I'll see one of those perfectly shaped snowflakes land on my coat, after all these years I still think they are cool.

I just wish its trillions of friends would get off my lawn (and driveway).

FRACTALS !!!

[Taco Cowboy]

Wow !

The 3D structures of the snowflakes are fractals !!

Hopefully someone can come up with a fractal software that can let users experimenting with various 3D snowflake shapes

And with the availability of 3D printing, who knows what kind of new art forms this will bring forth ??

Image quality

[Kenoli]

All of these images are low res and out of focus.

Photographing falling snowflakes is probably pretty tricky, but some of them are just awful.
eg.
http://www.inscc.utah.edu/~tgarrett/Snowflakes/Gallery/2013.01.27_06.25.55.5_flake_17839_cam_2.png
http://www.inscc.utah.edu/~tgarrett/Snowflakes/Gallery/2012.02.18_22.43.52_flake_1406_cam_2.png
http://www.inscc.utah.edu/~tgarrett/Snowflakes/Gallery/2012.11.09_06.14.16_flake_107_cam_0.png
http://www.inscc.utah.edu/~tgarrett/Snowflakes/Gallery/2013.02.22_16.06.08.425688_flake_16605_cam_1.png