Thought I’d get in today’s post before I head back to bed.
This photo was taken in my garden last week, when we were still having frost instead of the deluge of rain we’ve had this past week. Can you believe it was 10C at 8pm a couple of nights ago? I worry that the plants will think it’s time to start blooming – at the wrong time of year.
Anyway, what I love about this photo is the fact that you can see how the crystals formed. They’re all longitudinal crystals, like the Dutch sprinkles you put on your breakfast toast. They’re similar to the crystals you see in mud sometimes after a cold night – needle ice, which in that case pushes the mud up as it forms.
Here it’s just formed on the surface of the leaves. Hurrah for a macro lens to capture these details.
I love the picture: the disorder of molecules in water vapour converted into the neatly stacked arrays in the crystals.
One occasion when it seems entropy doesn’t apply – the water vapour is getting more organized, not less organized.