Snowflakes are beautiful when falling from the sky, and most of us love to see the first snow of winter. That’s before winter sets in to the point where we’re trapped inside our homes, unable to traverse the driveway, or sloshing through muck downtown. When we see the first snowflakes of the season it starts all over again – first with wonderment and delight. (For most of us – your mileage may vary.)

To see some amazing closeups of snowflakes, drift over to Cal Tech’s snowflake lab: Snowflake and Snow Crystal Photographs. There are three snowflake galleries to sift through in reverie, thinking about how perfect and beautiful the world really is.

Snow crystals are made of frozen water and that’s all. They can float into your yard alone, or with their buddies, in a huge snowflake. They are formed by water vapors in the clouds freezing. This is different than sleet, which is merely frozen rain. Sleet doesn’t have the beautiful crystalline formations found in snowflakes.

Snowflakes are all six-sided. They start as hexagonal shapes, then grow, forming an infinite variety of designs to delight us.