needles

Our favorite snow crystals have six points. Always six. Well, unless two merge, then they sometimes have twelve points.
These six-pointed snow crystals are called stellar dendrites. Stellar means star-shaped and dendrite means tree-like, so they are crystals with branches and side branches.

When we cut out ‘snowflakes’ from folded paper as children, we were actually cutting out snow crystals. And usually with eight points, because that was easier. We were cutting out fantasy snowflakes.
In reality, snowflakes are a fluffy mess of snow crystals clumped together.

Besides six-pointed stellar dendrites, there are all sorts of other shapes of snow crystals, such as columns and needles, capped columns, triangular flat crystals, diamond dust crystals (which look like luminous dust in sunlight) and fern-like stellar dendrites (with many parallel side branches, like a fern).

Why do stellar dendrites always have six points? …