Can anyone help me identify what is in this picture ?
Background :
Our local vet clinic often posts pics like this on Wednesdays. Sometimes it’s a flea egg, or an X-Ray, typically animal related (maybe always animal related).
This one is killing me, it doesn’t look organic. I can’t wait a week to find out. Any ideas ?
It’s a snow crystal.
Whoa - scroll down to the bottom set of images for a great series where they keep increasing the magnification on one particular view. It’s just stunning.
Thanks, you guys are great.
I never would have come up with that.
-Cheers
You can do a reverse picture look-up at www.tineye.com.
That’s amazing.
The link that pulykamell provided certainly includes the picture that ChuckForbin linked to, and the snow flake pics in pulykamell’s series are recognizable as snow flakes, but is ChuckForbin’s pic really a snow flake? It doesn’t look anything like my idea of a crystal.
I decided before I posted to try to answer my own question, and found this. The photo in the OP is a column crystal, and the coral-looking stuff is rime.
Wow, how the hell does that work ?
What a great tool.
Google image search does the same thing.
How do they put snowflakes in a SEM without it melting? Don’t they need to coat it in something conductive first? And doesn’t the electron beam heat it?
They don’t.
They do; what you see isn’t the snowflake, it’s the coating layer, a replica. Probably carbon or gold.
Unless it’s an ESEM, the vacuum inside the SEM is enough to evaporate the ice regardless of heating. But usually samples are (freeze) dried before they go into the SEM, since you need hard vacuum for the electron beam
ETA: Cool images, BTW 
An explanation of how these crystals are collected, shipped and photographed is here. They are apparently coated with platinum.
