Originally published at: http://boingboing.net/2017/06/12/spherical-cut-meteorite-on-eba.html
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To heck with spheres, I want a set of platonic solid shaped meteorites.
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A full set of gaming dice. Ooh, yeah.
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It’s beautiful but the thought of destroying a rare meteorite to make a sphere (because money) makes me cringe. Hope it finds a nice home to someone that will really appreciate it, but at $18k i doubt it.
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It’ll go the same way as many dinosaur skeletons being released on to the market:- to someone who wants a conversation piece but doesn’t care anything about its origins.
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If you’re going to post pictures showing the sphere from every side shouldn’t there be 360 pictures?
How is it destroyed? I’m looking at a gorgeous picture of it right here. It seems to have survived the polishing just fine, and with less damage than when it fell from the sky.
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Now that’s something to fidget with.
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Destroyed from it’s original form. It’d be like taking a dremmel to a dinosaur skeleton so you can have a few bones. I do agree that it’s beautiful, see my post above… and i’m not saying that they shouldn’t do so to the meteorite, but the act of breaking it up to polish a few choice bits makes me uncomfortable. However the practice of doing so is pretty common, i’m not naive.
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As a fan of the calculus, I take issue with your discretization.
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I have two small bits of iron meteorites. I would like one small slice of something with some Olivine in it next.
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I wish. I think I need a lot more to be considered one, and they are pricey.
Excluding ten-sided, then.
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I’ve actually been looking at milling dice from ‘common’ unclassified meteorites, or alternately, casting dice in resin with cutting flakes from making meteorite slices embedded in the plastic, just for the gee-whiz factor. Crystal Caste used to carry dice made from meteorites (and they were pricey) but I haven’t seen them recently.
Meteorites are frequently sliced to display internal characteristics; the sphere is not too unusual.
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I don’t think that meteorites are really that rare, meteorite collecting is a pretty popular hobby.
Meteor shit.
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When it comes to viewing spherical-cut meteorites, I’m partial to cordiform pseudoconical projections.
But that’s just me.
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Indeed, and that’s almost always the case for pallasites, which are commonly sliced into slabs and polished to bring out the beautiful “stained-glass” look of transparent olivine crystals embedded in the opaque matrix:
My favorite meteorite-buffing technique is to make a sphere of nickel-iron, and then etch it to bring out the crystal alignment and symmetry of the Widmanstätten figures, a result of the the octohedrite crystal structure often exhibited by nickel-iron meteorites:
(Such spheres are sometimes called “Gibeon spheres”, as they’re frequently sourced from the Gibeon Meteorite fall in Namibia, which distributed an estimated 26 tons of material over a 60x170 mi. strewnfield.)
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