Salt Crystals (2022-11-12)

I started exploring something new — growing crystals. Household salt was handy, so I gave that a try for starters. The basic idea is you heat up some water, put in enough salt to saturate the water, pour out some of that water into a jar, and have something like a piece of rope sticking into the water, so crystals can grow on it. As the water cools and evaporates, crystals build up — hopefully interesting ones — because the water is already saturated and so the minerals are forced to precipitate.

My first attempt went fairly well — there were some interesting cube-shaped crystals at the end of the rope, and some spikey ones along the middle of the rope.

I tried to do some photography of it with my wife's cell phone. This was very difficult, but amid many total failures, I was able to get these three slightly-blurry images. I did a slight amount of postprocessing with the Gimp "curves" tool, trying to bring out the detail better.

I think it would be interesting to try this again with something other than a rope, such as a fine metal mesh, or something that has sharp points on it, to see if I get more interesting crystal shapes.