New to the collection…

Posted by marko in astronomy, Featured Articles, Meteorites | 0 comments

I spent some time over the last couple of weeks weeding out my meteorite collection, with the aim of selling off a lot of less interesting ones, and buying a few historical falls. The results are beginning to appear.

A couple of small micros first – Quenggouk (fell in Irrawaddy, Burma, 1857)  - very rare, with a total weight of only 6,050g. Then another of Utzenstorf (fell Bern, Switzerland, 1928) – even more rare with a known weight of only 3,420g.

Then today I received a beautiful 1.5g part slice of Menow. This was traded by Rob Elliot from the NHM in London. It’s a slightly higher weight – 10kg – but not too much of it has left the institutions.

My favourite so far is a 1.3g crusted fragment of Buschhof (Latvia, *1863). Originally from the NHM at the Smithsonian, it was traded out by Mike Bandli. It looks like a rind peeled out from an orange – most of one side is crusted.

Finally, what I consider a future historic fall. I referred in an earlier post to the asteroid 2008 TC3, which was spotted hours before impacting in the north African desert. Well, that asteroid was recovered after impact, and is now know as meteorite Almahata Sitta (Sudan, *2008). Less than 4kg was recovered, and a small fragment of it is now in my collection cabinet!

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