The Saskatchewan (Buzzard Coulee) Meteorite Search and Recovery Part II

I was able to go out once again and look for the Buzzard Coulee Meteorite, was out a month ago with the University of Calgary research team and found 3 stones, this time I found 6 meteorites........the difference being, this go round I was able to keep them, Woo triple frigging Hoo!!

I went out with Astro-Nuts and his father, whom I have known for years through our local RASC club. We met up with a group of people who were given permission to search the landowners property. The above image is a pic of my favorite find, it has so much character. When meteors fall to the ground, this one in particular, (Buzzard Coulee) broke into thousands of tiny pieces, most of them tumble through the atmosphere before they hit the surface, the one above somehow got orientated and pointed one direction and developed flow-lines. It also has a couple cool looking thumbprints or regmaglypts, caused by vortices of hot gas burning thumbprint like impressions into the rock.(image above a domesticated meteorite, image below, what the same meteorite looks like in the wild.)




No matter how often you find these stones it's always a thrill, you are the first person on Earth to touch these rocks from space.

200x microscopic image of a flow line.

200x microscopic image of melt that occurred during entry into our atmosphere.


Search or Strewn Field.



Search Team.



Meteorite haul.

Hey there is nothing more satisfying then going to a meteorite strewn field, searching for and finding meteorites, bagging them, getting them GPSed, then taking them home to take and post pictures of for all of you, and even selling them, that's right as long as you are from Canada and you would like to purchase one I can sell them to you, but you have to be from Canada, seems the seller needs a permit if they want to sell outside Canada, odd, but once rocks from space fall in Canada they become part of our culture, go figure, another government money grab. I don't usually talk about selling stuff on this blog but if you are interested I have and have access to people with some rocks for sale at a decent price if you are so inclined.

A fun time was had by all. As I was taking microscopic images of one of my stones I also took some more polarized microscopic images of my angrite meteorite thin section and animated it for you, these extremely rare stones, some scientists believe their origin is Mercury are very cool and make as far as I'm concerned great art when crossed polarized.

The Angrite Meteorite

Sahara Angrite 99555 40x Cross Polarization

A while back I posted about my Saskatchewan (Buzzard Coulee) meteorite. Well a reader..... we'll call him Mike...mostly because that is his name, emailed me telling me he had a Buzzard Coulee meteorite as well. So we conversed back and forth about meteorites and the like and he happened to ask me whether or not I had ever imaged my thin slices in cross polarization, I thought to myself, "who's doing what now?", and he explained.

Sahara Angrite 99555 thin slice

I had seen images of colorful meteorite thin slices before, but never knew how they got the pretty colors to show, some are just to die for. Long story short Mike sent me a couple of films to do some imaging with, for free, very cool.


Microscope and alien

You sandwich your meteorite thin slice in between the polarization films, which does it's magic and allows Meteoriticists (meteor scientists) to determine the mineral and chemical composition of the meteorite therefore giving them a better idea how the meteorite formed in the first place. I like taking the images because I am creating art, they kind of remind me of abstract art or stained glass windows.

Sahara Angrite 99555 40x Cross Polarization

Angrites are the rarest, most sought after, most mysterious and studied meteorite in the world, to date only around 50 pounds worldwide have been collected. The only thing they know for sure is that they came from a large body near the Sun. Some Meteoriticists believe they originated from Mercury, no conclusive proof either way but we should know a little more when Messenger reaches orbit around Mercury in March 2011 and does some surface composition analysis, giving the Meteoriticists another piece to the Angrite puzzle, compare the known samples of Angrites with the Messenger data to see if there are any similarities.




Okay, I'm going to do something a little bit different, going to step out of my comfort zone, instead of posting a reflective water animation I'm going to do a rotating square collage, I know, I know, call me crazy and wild, but I thought I would switch it up a bit.

Six Random Space Things

Stephanie has tagged me with a meme, I don't usually do memes, mostly because of all the rules, only one rule on this blog, and that is..... 1. There are no rules, well maybe one, I can't do swears, no swears, my wife would slap me silly.

I will follow the main rule, "Write six things most people don't know about one of your specialties. This could be hobbies, professions or whatever." So, where angels fear to tread, I will proceed.

1. The Earth is flat. You read me right, actually Anna told me about The Flat Earth Society over a year ago, I haven't stopped laughing since. They have some compelling theories that the Earth is really flat. They do a pretty good job of fielding questions from the Round Earthers, such as." If you guys think the world is flat how do you explain ships on the horizon disappearing?" Duh, and hello........... the "Bendy Light Theory"...need I say anymore?.....probably.


2. Shrouds of the Night. A newly released book that is just frigging awesome!! It stands out from all the other astronomy books I own, really, it is a real long book dimension wise, that's how it caught my attention in the bookstore. I don't know what I like more about this book, (that is apart from it's stickyouteeness), the poetic historical data from Bushman folklore about how the stars were formed, to the beautifully awesome images of our galaxy and auroras. Using state of the art near infrared technology and the best telescopes, the cold dark cosmic dust shroud that masks our view of our galaxy is removed to show ours and other galaxies in a whole new light. A lot of these images have never been released to the general population before this book. About the authors David Block and Kenneth Freeman, " Their voyage lies not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes."




3. Gamma-Ray Bursts. My favorite Massive Earth Extinction scenario. The biggest explosions in our Universe since the Big Bang. They emit as much energy in seconds as our Sun will produce in it's entire lifetime of 10 billion years. Bright as a million trillion Suns GRBs are the result of a dying collapsed exploding massive Sun shooting deadly Gamma-Rays into space, woe to the planet it's beams of plasma strike. Mind you there is only a 1% chance of one of them hitting Earth in it's entire lifetime, but hey..shit happens (oops), all the more reason we........

4. Do you know that back in 1969 the then Vice President Spiro Agnew's Space Task Group put forth the 10 year 78 billion dollar Man-to-Mars Program, we could have been on Mars by now, but it never got past the "great idea but we can't afford it" stage. We are closer to getting to Mars technology wise today then we were getting to the Moon back when Kennedy challenged NASA to land a man on the Moon by the end of the decade, and they did it in 8 years. Why should we spend the 400 billion dollars to put a few people on Mars? see point 3.



5. I have a pretty cool meteorite collection including a Moon and Mars meteorite and even a rare piece of asteroid Vesta, mind you they are like extremely small, can't afford the regular versions, in fact they are so small that if you were to sneeze in their general direction they'd fly like 23 feet in the air before floating to the ground. My most fav meteorite is what they call an Angrite.
Angrites are very rare, only about 11 confirmed rocks have been found to date, here's the thing, scientists don't really know their origin like they do all the other types of meteorites, the best guesses are a planetary type body or large asteroid, Vesta has been ruled out, there are some scientists that believe these Angrites originate from Mercury, how cool is that? When Messenger finally obtains it's Mercury Orbital Insertion March 2011 and begins it's surface composition analysis it will give us a better idea whether or not Angrites are actually from Mercury or not.



6. Space dust in the form of Spherical micrometeorites about the diameter of the human hair fall to Earth daily, you have probably been struck by some. I have spent literally hundreds of hours looking for them where they are most likely to gather, like at the bottom of my eavestrouph downspout, I spend countless hours digging in the dirt with a spoon looking for these little treasures. I have also set up huge poly vinyl collectors on the top of my mall's roof. I am in the process right now of imaging some of my best suspect micrometeorites with the Celestron LCD Digital Microscope. One day I hope to put them all together in a movie for your viewing pleasure.

Well that's it that's all folks, hope I at least told you something you didn't already know, after all that is what I set out to do, if you knew all this stuff already let me know, I'll send you a free pair of Hanna Montana/Miley Cyrus 3D glasses.