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Check out the Highest Resolution Snowflake Photos Ever Taken
Former CTO at Microsoft, Nathan Myhrvold, has just captured the highest resolution photographs of snowflakes ever made with a camera he built.
Social & Lifestyle
Going from the top floor of Microsoft to cookbook superstardom, jack of all trades Nathan Myhrvold has just taken the highest resolution photographs of snow crystals ever.
The images, capturing the ever-unique molecular structure in stunning color and depth, required all manner of specialist equipment assembled together in lockdown as part of a garage project.
Most snowflakes are less than half an inch wide, and will dissolve quite fast if not in contact with equally frozen material. The melting issue would be one of the biggest challenges for Myhrvold and it ended up requiring all manner of interesting tech.
As a man possessing a Ph.D. in theoretical mathematics and physics from Princeton University, and who served as Chief Technology Officer at Microsoft for 14 years, Myhrvold had no trouble solving the problem.
He got to work building a machine that was part-microscope-part-camera. It ended up standing five-feet tall on a table and weighing 50 pounds. A thermoelectric cooling system, carbon fiber framing, and cool LED lights ensured there was no heat emanating onto the snow flake in focus.
“Light could melt the snowflake, so I found a company in Japan that makes LED lights for industrial purposes,” Myhrvold told Smithsonian. “My camera’s flash is one-millionth of a second and a thousand times faster than that of a typical camera flash.”
There was also a challenge involving capturing the physical snowflake, one that was solved using, of all things, sapphire crystal, instead of glass because it doesn’t capture and radiate heat as much as glass does.
Ice cold mathematics
In December, Good News Network examined the mathematics and physics behind the formation of the iconic hexagonal snowflake with six arms—the kind Myhrvold photographed with his camera.
Read more:
https://www.goodnewsnetwork.org/nathan-myhrvold-captures-highest-resolution-pictures-of-snowflakes/