Snowflakes

Have you ever had the chance to look at snowflakes? I mean really look at them. Over the weekend they were falling on my denim coat as I waited outside. The flakes were 1/4 inch across, and the deadly looking six pointed stars fell on the dark blue backdrop. I watched (until I got too cold) them land, saw the hexagonal perfection with dendritic and bladed tines fall, only to melt and turn into the tiniest of drops with just the heat from my arm. With so many snowflakes falling, can they really all be different? Perhaps the same shapes fall every year, in just a different location on the globe. All the myriad ways... Snowflakes don't fall like this very often, usually I need a hand lens just to see them and the smaller ones melt even faster. And I find that breathing on them wrecks them at an unheard of rate.