One Frozen Moment at a Time

Kenneth G. Libbrecht thought there ought to be a field guide to snowflakes. But he wasn't happy with the photographs he could find, so the chairman of the physics department at the California Institute of Technology designed and built his own photo-microscope to capture individual snow crystals on film.

Mr. Libbrecht had been studying crystal growth for about three years, using ice as a "cheap case study" and posting findings on his Web site (http://www.snowcrystals.com) before he

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