Sun Dogs and Desert Glass

Was out imaging a Sunrise when a couple Sun dogs formed, very pretty and long.



I thought to myself, what a beautiful backdrop for a piece of my Libyan Desert Glass so I ran home hoping that the dogs would still be there when I got back, they were, and took a pic.


You can actually see a little of a Solar Pillar coming up through the middle of the glass. What exactly is Libyan Desert Glass?


Just back in 1998 an Italian Mineralogist Vincenzo de Michele was visiting the Egyptian Museum in Cairo when he happened to notice the scarab in one of King Tutankhamun's breastplates. The Egyptians said it was a semi precious stone used in some of the Egyptian's Pharaoh's jewelery back in the day. Vincenzo had his doubts and did some research on the scarab and found it to be glass. He then remembered back in 1932 when British explorer Patrick Clayton found this yellow green glass in the Sahara desert. Comparing it to some of the found pieces he concluded they were identical. So the mystery of this beautiful glass started, how was it made and where did it come from?


Further investigation and chemical analysis showed that the dark streaks in some of the collected samples and in my first image sample with the Sun dogs, were made up of Osmium and Iridium, both very rare and something you would not expect to find in surface rocks on Earth but are very common in meteorites. Long story short using computer models and simulations they found that the samples were probably created by an asteroid's or comet's arial burst around 28 million years ago. They figure an asteroid or comet, 120 meters in diameter hit our atmosphere at around 20 kms a second, broke up just before it hit the ground creating temperatures and a fire storm as hot as the surface of the Sun melting the surrounding sand, when the sand cooled quickly it formed this glass.

There is another theory as well. " The Altlantis Blueprint" puts forth the theory that the ancients, and by ancient I mean more so then the Egyptians, understood all about nuclear power and that some incident involving nuclear power or weapons created the desert glass, very interesting, not something I really go for but still cool to read.


Roger sent me his first Earthshine image of the Moon, great shot Roger!! Roger is getting all geared up for the Moon /Pleiades conjunction this coming Tuesday night. The Moon and Pleiades will be traveling together throughout the night but will be closest around 9:30 pm CST.

I'll leave you now with a YouTube video of part one of the special "Fireball of Tutankhamun"