PSE Advent Calendar 2024 (Day 1): A Snowy Christmas

Question

<sub>This puzzle is part of the Puzzling Stack Exchange Advent Calendar 2024. The accepted answer to this question will be awarded a bounty worth 200 reputation.

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What is hidden here? A complete answer will explain the snowflakes' appearances, their positioning and the final result.

Hint 1:

Pranay correctly noted that the arrangement spells "COLOR" in Braille. To get the correct ones, you should focus on the centers.

Hint 2:

The centers of each snowflake each have one of the following hex values: f2f2f2, f3f3f3, f4f4f4. It might be helpful to find similarities within the same group and differences to others in order to proceed. You don't have to rearrange/visually group the snowflakes.

Answer 1

What's happening? It's snowing. The snowflakes are wishing ...

... Happy Holidays!

The snowflakes' positions:

Taking the image as a 10×3 grid, then reading each of the five 2×3 subgrids as Braille latter yields ⠉⠕⠇⠕⠗ or COLOR. Pranay found that one.

All snowflakes are different!

Apparently, "color" is a hint towards the next step, but the image isn't particularly colourful. It has a black-to-blue gradient in the background and white snowflakes. Sarsaparilla found that the snowflakes are of three different shades of white: They are a bright grey with all RGB components 242, 243 and 244 respectively. A keen eye won't help you here, you need the eyedropper tool to get the exact values.

The first group:

The snowflakes encode a message, but there's a slight difference in how the not-much-off-, medium-off- and quite-off-white flakes encode it.

Let's take the 242/255 grey flakes first:



These flakes only have short crystal arms. They can be in seven possible positions. Together with the last digit (either hex or decimal) of the RGB values, that suggests the binary numbers 1110000, 1111001, 1101111, 1101100 and 1110011. (The most significant bit is near the centre of the flakes.)

In decimal, these values are 112, 121, 111, 108 and 115. These are ASCII codes in the lower-case letter region, namely for p, y, o, l and s.

The second group:

Now the 243/255 grey:



This time, we also have spikes of twice the normal length. We get the ternary numbers 10121, 01012, 02200 and 01020. In decimal: 97, 32, 72 and 33. In ASCII: a, _, H and !. (The second one is a space.)

The last group:

Now the 244/255 grey ones:



There are even larger spikes here. The RGB values end in 4. You know what that means: We get quaternary numbers 1020, 1300, 1221, 1210, 1201 and 1321. In decimal: 72, 112, 105, 100, 97 and 121. In ASCII: H, p, i, d, a and y.

Putting it all together:

The first flake is a capital letter. The last flake is a punctuation symbol. We can just read off the answer in the regular reading direction:

 H a p   p   y   _
       H o     l i d
     a   y   s   !

Thanks

I haven't solved the first two steps. They were solved by Pranay and sarsaparilla and later confirmed by Lukas. So thanks for that.

Answer 2

Answer:

COLOR in Braille (⠉⠕⠇⠕⠗)

Explanation:

The snowflakes appear to be made of arrows pointing to their centres (as noted by @RonchenLuo) suggesting that we should focus on the centres (as suggested by Hint 1). Indeed, the centres form the dots in Braille script (the one with 3×2 grid of dots for each letter) which then spell the word COLOR as shown in the image below. I am still not sure what the relevance to Christmas is.