Category: "Announcements"

Mermaid Affair: A Celebration of Water

May 31st, 2010

A fascinating art exhibit dedicated to water in all its many forms will be opening June 1, 2010, at the Commerce Pointe Gallery in Battle Creek, Michigan. I contributed a couple of large snow crystal prints for the exhibit - which I believe are the only photographs of water as snow in the event. With a little luck, copies of The Story of Snow will be on hand at the gallery.

The opening reception will be Friday evening, June 11. The exhibit closes August 31, 2010.

For details, see a-mermaid-affair.net.

Japanese Edition Coming Soon!

March 13th, 2010

An interesting package arrived in the mail earlier this week - it contained a couple of advance copies of The Story of Snow, Japanese edition. Here's a scan of the cover - the book is a bit smaller (physical dimensions) than the US edition. How cool!

 

- Mark

A Few Irregulars

March 7th, 2010

I hear the birds sing in the morning - the Cardinal with his 'bomb drop' song, the slurry scrabbly song of starlings at first light, and the 'To-hee to-hee chickachickadeedeedee' of Chickadees - the only bird that sings in deep winter, and gets all the more enthusiastic as spring starts to show.

Snow crystal season is coming to an end - another year.

Photographing snow crystals is a funny thing. I tend to select the best and the brightest, the most symmetrical, the most regular, the most ... extraordinary. It is a biased selection process, for sure. I wipe away thousand of snow crystals in an evening, and take photos of only a few dozen. There is a huge selection bias in play in the photos of snow crystals that are presented...

Of course - no one wants to see photos of the imperfect, the unsymmetrical, the broken or worn. That would be like walking down the street and looking at those passing by... Show us Hollywood Celebrities - the paragons of glamour - and not the ordinary dust of creation.

What can I say? It would be dishonest to ignore the vast numbers of irregular and flawed snow crystals. They outnumber the perfect ones one an incredible scale. So here are a few imperfect crystals - I have to say, they are more perfect than not, in that the truly disorganized have been ignored.

Irregular Snow Crystal

So - how many arms are on this crystal? I vote for ten, but it looks like nine or eleven are possible answers as well. And I thought snow crystals grew in multiples of six - but maybe not when they break up, fracture, grow and re-grow again.

Here's a crystal that is a little asymmetrical. It also has an interesting feature in that one pair of arms have grown across the center.

Irregular Snow Crystal

Here's another show showing a similar center band - the crystal was not laying flat on the glass, so the edges of the arms are visually soft.

Irregular Snow Crystal

 A snow crystal grows with a lack of symmetry when it lingers near a source of water on one side - lie passing by a big rain drop in the clouds - that creates a different in the relative humidity between one end of the crystal and the other. Here are three snow crystals showing this lack of symmetry - 

Irregular Snow Crystal

Irregular Snow Crystal
Irregular Snow Crystal

Here's a simple snow crystal that is a composite of three individual snow crystals - or were they really ever individual, or did it just start growing from three nearby nuclei?

Irregular Snow Crystal

And lastly - here is one that is not irregular at all. I think this is a Magono-Lee P6d - stellar with spatial dendrites.

Irregular Snow Crystal
Maybe next winter I'll come up up with a system to tak ejust a sandom sample of the snow crytals that fall - how many are imperfect or not?
For now I lokk forward to the inevitable change over to spring - the longer days, the singing birds, the greening of the trees and brush...
- Mark

 

Chicago Public Library "Best of the Best - 2010" List

February 20th, 2010

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.

 

Snowflake Photograh
- Mark

Three From This Evening

February 15th, 2010

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

Snow Crystal Photo
Snow Crystal Photo
Snow Crystal Photo
Click for larger images.
- Mark

It Snowed Today

February 9th, 2010

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

Blue Ribbon From BCCB

January 28th, 2010

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

Snow at last!

January 27th, 2010
Snow Crystal Photo

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.