Buffalo, NY — The snow continues this week, and do you ever stop to look at the snowflakes?
Well, there's a rare snowflake exhibit at the Buffalo Science Museum called the Bentley Snowflake Microphotograph Collection.
"Everyone knows the quote, 'No two snowflakes are alike' but I don't know how many actually know where it came from," said Kathy Leacock, Director of Collections at Buffalo Science Museum. "A person said that and published that, and that individual was Wilson Bentley... he was fascinated by snowflakes... and his plan was to start photographing snowflakes."
Bentley did that, for almost half a century starting in the 1880's in Jericho, Vermont.
"We call these photomicrographs because they are a blend of a photograph from a camera and a microscope," Leacock explained.
Leacock also says the Buffalo Science Museum purchased 11,000 of the snowflake glass plate negatives from Bentley's family in 1947, and also his original notebooks, which she says you can't find anywhere else but here.
"What makes this collection Buffalo proud is that it's the negatives and we have his original data, we have his notebooks," Leacock said. "There's a book where he scratched in the temperature, data... and he recorded the weather data for 47 years."