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WASHINGTON — One of nature's most lovely creations sometimes blankets large areas but rarely gets the close look it deserves.

But take photos of just four snowflakes, print millions of copies, and you have this year's holiday postage stamps, being issued Thursday in New York and on sale nationwide Friday.

The 39-cent stamps feature photos taken by Kenneth Libbrecht, a physics professor at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.

Libbrecht got interested in how crystals grow, and snow seemed a logical place to look. The actual physics of the process wasn't well understood, he said.

"It's not trivial," he added. "It's really kind of a fundamental puzzle."

So he began making chambers to produce snow crystals in the lab, and began photographing them when he realized that there weren't a lot of good images available.

He used a high-resolution digital camera attached to a specially designed microscope. The work was done outdoors in subfreezing temperatures with the camera placed in a heated box to keep it working.