Icy jewel

Snowflake photo: Icy jewel (2048 x 1536)

Prints of this snow crystal available at: Artist website (mirrors at Pixels and FineArtAmerica), RedBubble.com.
Licenses for commercial use - at Shutterstock.com, 500px.com.

This snowflake is relatively big (around 4 millimeters from tip to tip), with simple shape, but complex inner pattern (especially at arms). If you look closely at this crystal, you may notice that it slightly resembles triangular snowflakes (some examples: Enigma, Almost triangle and Four directions): like these snow crystals, it have hexagonal symmetry, but with interleaving shorter/longer sides of central hexagon. In this case, however, triangular structure is hardly noticeable.

Also, you can find small and simple plate crystal at surface of bigger one, and this tiny companion also have triangular structure, with three shorter and three longer sides. This is strange and beautiful couple, in my opinion.

8 identical photos averaged to boost signal-to-noise ratio. Background: dark woolen fabric, natural light (cloudy sky), external optics Helios 44M-5, December 2014, Moscow, Russia.

This jewel available as ultra HD wallpaper:

One year ago i've captured similar snowflake: The core, smaller crystal with almost perfect hexagonal symmetry and simple, though interesting, volume surface:

If you want to see more snowflakes, you can browse through all snowflake pictures.
And here is article about snowflake macro photography.