Well said, Rob! I'll be saving this post...
... given the number of people that come to me [repeatedly] with their "meteorite hopefuls", I'll be using it over, and over, again... ;-) Bob V. --------------------------------------------------- [meteorite-list] It's not a meteorite -- move on Matson, Robert [EMAIL PROTECTED] Tue, 7 Jan 2003 13:29:40 -0800 Greetings Mohamed and List, Mohamed opined: > The little spheroids do not have any layers inside, when I > break one of them I get a reflecting crystalline surface, > milky white to gray in color(pyroxenes as I believe). In > addition to that they are not affected at all by a > dilluted HCl. Fine, it's not an oolite. My guess was based on similar morphology, but the scale is wrong. Your spheroids are too large. The point is that your ROCK is clearly not a meteorite -- not even remotely close to looking like one. As others have pointed out before, you do not seem to be making much progress toward finding meteorites despite spending what appears to be a fair amount of time looking for them. Oman has plenty of meteorites, so that's not the problem. Your problem is that you don't have a good search image -- you keep gravitating to the same types of terrestrial rocks, and spending an inordinate amount of time (yours and ours) trying to convince yourself that they just might be meteorites. You'll never find one this way. My advice? Buy a variety of common Dhofar meteorites off eBay or from one of the many fine dealers in the world and really LOOK at them. Study their texture, their shapes, their heft, their color. Memorize them. Then take them with you to a place where Oman meteorites have been found before. Preferably choose a place that isn't littered with dark rocks and start searching. Every 15 minutes or so, refresh your memory of what you're looking for by staring at your *known* meteorites. It is easy to diverge from your search image when you're staring at lots of terrestrial rocks. Remember, meteorites are rare. Your only chance at finding them is by covering LOTS of area. That's why it's important to choose your area wisely, and not waste valuable time on rocks that only superficially resemble meteorites. A final bit of advice: there are a lot more meteorites that are smaller than 100 grams than larger. Adjust your search image to be realistic with those statistics. When all is said and done, I think your experience will be that your first meteorite will find YOU rather than the other way around. Some day you'll just be walking along, searching, your mind wandering from one random thought to another, and VOILA! You'll stop dead in your tracks. Your heart will jump. You won't have to make excuses for it or talk yourself into it -- you'll know it's a meteorite before you even touch it... --Rob ------------------------------------------------ __________________________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? New DSL Internet Access from SBC & Yahoo! http://sbc.yahoo.com ______________________________________________ Meteorite-list mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/meteorite-list
