Photo of the Day
Snowflakes by the Snowflake Man
Saturday 3 October 2026
Snow crystals photographed by Wilson Bentley, a farmer from Jericho, Vermont. He rigged a microscope to a bellows camera and worked in the cold, catching each flake on a black board and shooting it before it could melt.
Fun facts
- Bentley made the first known photograph of a single snowflake on 15 January 1885, when he was 19. source ↗
- He photographed more than 5,000 snowflakes over nearly 50 winters. source ↗
- Snowflakes have six sides because water molecules lock into a hexagonal lattice as they freeze. source ↗
- This plate appeared in the Monthly Weather Review's annual summary for 1902, published in 1903. source ↗
- Image
- Wilson A. Bentley · NOAA Historic NWS Collection
- Licence
- Public domain
- Source
- Wikimedia Commons