Everything They Told Us Was Wrong: This Is What Falling Snow Really Looks Like

It's springtime, and no one wants to be reminded of snow. But University of Utah researchers just unveiled a new high-speed camera called the Multi-Angle Snowflake Camera that can capture shots of snowflakes as they free-fall. This is the first time that an instrument has been able to instaneously snap pictures of flakes before they are molded by a device—such as a microscope slide—and shots reveal that  snow's geometry looks nothing like it does in the movies.

Tim Garrett, an associate professor of atmospheric sciences at Utah, said "these perfectly symmetric, six-sided snowflakes, while beautiful, are exceedingly rare—perhaps one-in-a-thosuand at the most." Those construction-paper cutouts we made as kids were lies, after all.

Snowflakes, Garrett continues, are almost never a single crystal. They often experience "riming," where water droplets collide with flakes and freeze, thus changing their shape. These are called graupels, and when snowflakes combine with other flakes, they're called an aggregate.

The photos are hyper-detailed (as expected), and Alta Ski Area has also provided a constantly-refreshing feed of the images the camera captures. Now that we know our perceptions of snowflakes have been way off base, maybe we can finally see what some warm weather shapes look like.