Hi,
app. 2 weeks ago,
Steve Arnold (Illinois) sold a "mystery NWA" on ebay. This is the text that came
with the auction (as often with Steve, no pic):
"Up here for auction is a mystery.This is a
134.9 gram whole stone that has been cut by AL LANG.It is a unclassified NWA
mystery stone.I had bob haag,richard norton,al lang,ed thompson,blaine reed, and
a few others give thier opinion on what it might be.No one knows.It has a very
rich dark brown matrix.Very few or none at all with chondrules.High in metal,
but it pulls very weakly even with a strong magnet.You can be the lucky winner
of this mystery stone and you can try and get it classified.It measures 6.5 cm x
5.2 cm x 3.8 cm.I will start the bidding at $1.00. Good luck."
Well, I bidded and
won the item. Today it arrived. I had a closer look at it, took some photographs
and am looking for your expertise now.
Let me describe the
tactile impressions: The item is feels pretty cold when you hold it, and it has
about the right weight for a meteorite of this size. However: the outside feels
quite "soft", more like an ordinary stone than a meteorite, like a pebble that
has been in the water.
There is indeed a
lot of metal visible from the outside, but on the cut surface, the deeper you go
inside, the less metal you find. A close examination with a 10x magnification
showed no chondrules at all, at least for me.
Here are three
photos of the object (they are quite large in order to reveal more details). I
have brightened the photos and added some contrast and some mild sharpening, but
I'd say they are true to the visual appearance of the
object:
So - what's your
impression? Is it a meteorite at all? What is it?
Bernhard
