One hundred years ago this August…

54 Pages·2012·9.15 MB·English

Meteorite Times Magazine
Contents
by Editor
Featured Monthly Articles
Accretion Desk by Martin Horejsi
Jim's Fragments by Jim Tobin
Meteorite Market Trends by Michael Blood
Bob's Findings by Robert Verish
IMCA Insights by The IMCA Team
Micro Visions by John Kashuba
Meteorite Calendar by Anne Black
Meteorite of the Month by Editor
Tektite of the Month by Editor
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Meteorite Times Magazine
Chantonnay: 200 Years and One Fine Person
by Martin Horejsi
One hundred years ago this August…
a meteorite fell on the small villa of Chantonnay, France. The stone was studied throughout the next two
hundred years including under the observant eye of Tschermak who described a fibrous translucent
mineral within the matrix. The fibers turned out to be olivine bronzite, a compound that later became class
of meteorites often referred to as H chondrites.

The sole cut and polished face on my specimen of Chantonnay holds a pleasant blend
of light and dark matrix sprinkled with metal flake and chondrules.
The crust on Chantonnay was noted as being an “entirely opaque” and a “black semiviterous
magma.”
The specimen number S121 is a notation from the Jim Schwade Collection.
Dr. Schwade acquired this specimen from the famous meteorite collector Walter Zeitschel.
While Jim is still with us, unfortunately Walter has moved on to other things.
While long past history is a great thing in meteorite collecting, there is also the human element, in specific
the collectors. As the piece of Chantonnay made its way through time, it stopped by visiting Walter
Zeitschel for a while. Walter passed on December 6th of 2009 leaving the rest of us to remember him and
share his story with the new crop of collectors. Walter was truly a gentleman of this sport and a very fine
ambassador of meteorites. He is still greatly missed.

This original specimen card from Walter Zeitschel accompanied Chantonay (sic) into the
Schwade collection,
and in turn also became an important piece of collection history.
The above text is some of the ancient research done with Chantonnay in the 1800s.
I always find it interesting to read such things as it sheds light on both the limited amount of
previous knowledge the scientist had to work with, but also the wonderful insights and
conclusions teased out of the odd rock from space.

As the vertical rays of the sun once again march north across the equator of our fine planet, take a
moment and consider all that a historical meteorites have been through, and an slightly longer moment to
remember those in our club whose collections are no longer growing.
Until next time….
The Accretion Desk welcomes all comments
and feedback. [email protected]
Meteorite Times Magazine
Spring Clean Up, Well Sort Of
by Jim Tobin
Not to dispute the old saying, that time flies. But, it just moves along. It is we that have a changing
perception from day to day or year to year. But, time itself passes at a constant rate. Unless, I am badly
mistaken this is the last month of year ten of Meteorite Times. I think Paul and I realized that we might be
offering something that people would enjoy. But, we never conceived that we would reach the 11 year
mark when we started. Or that it would seem to come so fast. Oh, sorry I am de-emphasizing the speed
of passing time.
About when we started Meteorite Times is when I “lost” some small Odessa irons that I had gotten at
Tucson from a non meteorite dealer. Liked them a lot and thought that I might someday make jewelry out
of them. They were really small and suited to placing in a silver cage or as was the fashion a decade ago
silver soldering a loop to them. Well, as I said I immediately “lost” them.
I have the word lost in quotation marks since I knew within a few feet where they must be in my garage.
The problem was that my grown-up family was needing my garage for storing their stuff as they moved
from apartments to houses and so on and over again.
My garage remained in a horrible condition until today. This morning, I finally accepted the challenge of
clearing out my old darkroom and the rest of the garage. Getting it set up to become a digital studio and
lab has finally made it to the top of my “do it list“. I gave away all my chemical photography equipment a
couple years ago. I never cleaned the darkroom up though, which had ages before become part of the
storage area. I had maintained a small spot for finishing the polishing of jewelry and meteorites but all
around me was hip deep clutter. In the middle of the garage I had maintained another small area with one
rock saw and the diamond lap. It has been a pain for a while working in the clutter, but the work itself never
suffered.
Back to the lost meteorites. I forgot where I had put the Odessa individuals. I knew they were somewhere
near that reserved clear spot, or on the bench just outside where my torches are. Today I found them on
the shelf above the small clear spot in an envelope. I do not recall even putting them in an envelope. I
found many other things too during the clean up. I was however, pretty brutal about throwing stuff away. I
got rid of nearly all the electronics related material. I can not imagine sitting down to do much electronics
anymore. The meteorites will I think keep me busy enough. I do want to get back to making some jewelry
though. I found my old shingle that hung over my bench when I worked at the craft plaza in my 20’s. I
made over the years many wedding sets for friends and relatives along with other jewelry. I have made
one or two pieces at least every year since just to keep my skills from dulling completely. But, there will be
a piece of bench space in the garage for jewelry when the cleaning is over. There are always those pieces
of meteorite that are too small or too ugly to sell as a specimen. But they can be made into something
really nice when polished and set. I can see my kiln on the floor. I am about two feet from reaching it to
see what kind of shape it is in. There is only one light box of stuff sitting on top of it. So hopefully it is ok.
I have picked the two scales that will go into the darkroom or “meteorite laboratory”. The first is a Mettler
with a 160 gram capacity that has less ranges to the right of the decimal point then the one in my office
but is still very sensitive. For larger work I am sending out a Torbal scale that is good to 2 kilogram.
I bought a desktop studio set up last week to aid me in taking pictures. It is a white fabric cube with spring
steel in the sides that keeps it popped up. It works like the window shades for cars that pop open. The
studio came with two nice lights and a small tripod plus several colored backgrounds. These I will
probably not use. I would guess that the meteorites will be photographed with the white background
almost exclusively. I have a couple more lights and may employ them as well. I’ll have to do some
experimenting to see how much illumination I need for the close up work. I think it more a matter of even
shadow-free illumination than more light.
I have cleared out the cabinets and drawers of all the old photo paper. All the related old chemicals have
been disposed of. It is ready to go digital except for vacuuming and putting in carpet.
It has been a few months since I first mentioned that the garage was going to be reworked into a meteorite
cutting lab. But, I am close now just a few more days. I am writing this early in the month so by the time
the issue actually comes out online I should be up and running. Some pieces of equipment have not even
seen the light of day for ten years. It will be fun to get them out of their boxes and set up again. Look for
more of our beautiful polished pieces of Muong Nong Layered Tektite. They take a long time in the
vibrating lap but they are really worth the work required.
Several more days have gone by since the last paragraph was written. Now, the floor is nearly completely
cleared and the darkroom has been vacuumed. One of the benches is completely cleaned off. The
vibrating lap is moved out ready to put up on the two tables that have just been sitting there disassembled
for ten years. Got some of my overheard lights up and working again. Today I was out there for just a few
minutes in the morning and I found another forgotten piece of the past. I do not even remember ever
having it but it had stuff in it and I must have been the one who picked it up and put it in there. It is the
pouch that came with my first metal detector. It must be about thirty-six or thirty-seven years ago that I
bought a White Coinmaster. I used it for years and still have it and also my father’s that he got at the same
time. There were no meteorites ever found with it but, relics and lots of bullets and coins were found.
Ghost towns, and mines were explored with it. As a young man I had great fun with it. For its time it was
one of the finest detectors available. It’s a pain to use by today’s standard. In many places where there
was black sand in the soil it required constant readjustment of the ground balance. But, it was sensitive
and I found a lot of stuff with it. I took it to Gold Basin once and tried to use it there on meteorites. I realized
very fast that if I was to be productive as a meteorite hunter I needed to move up to something more
modern and automatic. The poor old White has never been used since. But, one of my grand daughters is
interested in all things scientific and in having a metal detector; so she may get one of the Whites.
I moved the desk top studio out there this morning. I made a bracket yesterday to hold my camera over
where I am going to shoot. I had made a support for one of the big enlargers years ago and had left it
attached to the countertop. It was really nothing more than a galvanized piece of thin wall pipe that the
enlarger head moved up and down. But, now it will serve as a nice hands free mounting for my digital
camera. And as before I can move the camera up and down. It took about five minute for me to braze a
couple bolts to a pipe clamp so I could attach a ball head camera mounting that I had laying around. It
works wonderful. I will not have to fight the problem of adjusting a tripod and there will be no shadows to
worry about.