The Chicago Public Library recently published its "Best of the Best 2010" list - and The Story of Snow is on it! The library describes the list as including books that are "some of the very best published for kids in 2009."

You can see the whole list here:

http://www.chipublib.org/forkids/kidsbooklists/bestofbest_list.php

And here's a celebratory dendrite photo -  I reckon the subject is a P1e. It seems to have melted a little somewhere in the course of its existence, as the center areas of the arms in the lower left quadrant have smoothed out a bit.

I found Jon's post regarding the Magono-Lee Snow Crystal classification system to be quite interesting.  Here are some more shots from Monday night - I'll see if I can classify them... something tells me that will be more difficult than it sounds.

Let's start with something simple.  My first guess is that the two crystals that  follow would be classified as  P2d  - Dendrite with Sector-like ends:

It looks like that crystal bumped into a couple of simple plates along the way, and they are stuck to it in the lower right quadrant.

The one below has one spot of rime on it - which I assume is not enough to knock it into the rimey category, so it too is a P2d:

This one is similar in general form to the one above, but has a bit of rime spotting it up. I guess it would fall under rimed stellar R1d under Magono-Lee's system. Personally, I think it would make more sense to have rime as a qualifier of the basic shape, so if I was cooking up a classification scheme I'd call this a Dendrite with Sector-like ends with moderate rime. Maybe P2d-r2.

The next one is a 12 branched crystal without rime, so it is either a P4a (broad branched with 12 branches) or a P4b (dendrite with 12 branches.) Personally, I'd call it a 12 branched variant of the P2d formation, which we just saw above. Maybe P2d-2x? Well - under the existing system it is either a P4a or P4b...

You may have noticed what looks like a sectored plate emerging from one arm at about the 8 o'clock position - that appears to be a growth at the end of that arm.

OK - let's get back to something simple.  I think the following are all ordinary dendrites - P1e.

This first one has a 'crack' in the center plate - something I've seen several times. I'm not sure what causes it.

And I'll close out with three rimey subjects, the first two would be R1d - Rimed Stellar and, I think, the last one would be R2b - Densely Rimed Stellar. Though one might think it was a densely rimed fernlike stellar dendrite - maybe P1f-r3, eh?

Magono-Lee is an interesting classification system. I don't understand exactly why it places such an emphasis on rime at the expense of the core structure of the crystal. It seems to me that rime is an incidental condition independent of the core structure of the crystal. Classifying rimey crystals as a distinct group is sort of like lumping all molting birds into a distinct group. But just as Nietzsche  observed that histories reveal almost as much about the historians who wote them as about actual past events, I'd speculate that classification systems tell us a bit about the people who developed them as well as the subjects being classified. Maybe rime was important to Magono or Lee...

So - how many did I get right, Jon?

- Mark

A gentle snow has been falling this evening. Here are some snowflake photos, more will be coming:

Here's another snow crystal from  last week's shoot -

Yesterday' snow fizzled by midnight, and the show smiled upon us here in Michigan this morning. On the news I hear about the blizzard in the mid Atlantic, but up here in the snow belt all is calm.

Here's another snow crystal from yesterday's storm - imperfect but still interesting:

An another, fractured and imperfect:

And here's a link to a new review of The Story of Snow on the Art of Irreverence Blog  :

 http://artofirreverence.com/2010/02/09/snow/

- Mark

It snowed today. It's snowing now. At first the snow was hard and driving, wet and clumping. Now the snow is dry and dusty, tiny and incomplete. But between those things it breifly fell, small and well formed, tiny dots just a millimeter or so across.

Here's one photo from tonight.

Click the image for a larger view.

- Mark

The Story of Snow has been awarded a 2009 Blue Ribbon from the Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books! You can see all the details here:

http://bccb.lis.illinois.edu/blue09.html

- Mark

A light snow has been falling for the last few days. It's not been much. I look out my window at the lawn mowed last fall, and green tips of grass blades poke out of the snow. On the internet I see the lake effect snow bands playing out to the north, but they seldom wander down here.

But for a few hours tonight a light, fluffy snow fell. I managed to get a few photos, and this in one of them. As always, click on the image for a larger view.