If humidity is low, there isn’t as much water vapour in the atmosphere so the snowflakes form something called 'plates', the flat hexagonal shapes you see if you look at them under a microscope.

However, [Nathan Myhrvold] didn’t use an ordinary microscope to capture some beautiful snowflake pictures. According to [My Modern Met], the pictures are the highest resolution snowflake ...

...but these are freshly fallen snowflakes, or snow crystals, resting on wool. They are around 1 millimeter in size and were captured using a simple, cheap photography technique. When the snow ...