Wheel of time

Snowflake photo: Wheel of time. Full size: 1904 x 1428 pixels

Prints available at Artist website, RedBubble.com.
Licenses for commercial use - at Shutterstock.com, Marketplace.500px.com.

This is quite rare specimen: snowflake with twelve arms. These crystals can be spot easily even with naked eye, thanks to their unusual shape and relatively large size. I always look for these snowflakes, as well as triangular and hexagonal plate crystals - these types is my certain favorites.

This snow crystal is medium size: around 4 millimeters from tip to tip, and have almost perfectly symmetrical shape, with only small differences, mostly noticeable at tips of its branches. It was captured in january 2014, on large sheet of glass with LED back lighting, using additional lens Helios 44M-5 as magnifier. 8 identical RAW photos was averaged to raise signal/noise ratio of this picture.

I borrowed this title from great fantasy book series by Robert Jordan.

Here is variant in alternate colors:

Snowflake photo: Wheel of time II. Full size: 1904 x 1428 pixels

Prints available at Artist website, RedBubble.com.
Licenses for commercial use - at Shutterstock.com, Marketplace.500px.com.

And here is another 12-side crystal from this winter: Twelve months. Also, here you'll find very big snowflake with twelve arms, captured on dark woolen fabric, from winter 2015-2016.

I've used this photo to create square picture in a frame on pastel background, along with three other snowflakes:

If you want to see more snowflakes, you can browse through all snowflake pictures.
Here you'll find snowflake photo wallpapers in numerous resolutions and screen proportions, up to Ultra HD 4K.
And here is article about snowflake macro photography.