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Steve writes:

A few weeks ago, I sent fellow meteorite enthusiast Scott McGregor a picture of my display case for our local rock shows (I do a changing case every year for two different clubs). Scott thought some of Paul’s readers might enjoy seeing it and encouraged me to submit today’s post. Although it vastly pales in comparison with Darryl Pitt’s fantastic exhibit (MPOD 4/4/24) and was seen by far fewer people (only a few thousand compared with an expected several million for Darryl’s), it still provided a fun opportunity to share my passion for meteorites with others. And chance meetings at two of the past shows resulted in me acquiring a true garage find (MPOD 5/22/17) and the reemergence of Idaho’s first classified stone meteorite after being "lost" for 65 years (MPOD 9/24/20).

So with that context, I humbly offer today’s post (and I apologize for the poor quality photos – especially the last one – but I hadn’t anticipated doing this and consequently just have some quick cell phone pics that I took to remind me of meteorite placement during setup).

Photo 1 shows the entire case with the front off (it’s a custom one I built because club cases, while sharing standardized 4’ by 2’ by 2’ dimensions, were not well suited for adding electronics or powering anything besides overhead floodlights). Items on display are, in no particular order:

The disappearing "Chondrite Carousel" turntable in Photo 2 with a number of chondrite meteorites showing examples of fusion crust, orientation, shock melt, and other features (and I realized after packing that I needed to change the label because "Carousel" is spelled wrong, but in some ways, I guess you can say they’re having a party spinning around, so maybe it’s not that far off!)

in Photo 3, a 4" Gibeon sphere in front of a second rotating turntable with an 8" Gibeon cube and small slices of Taza, Canyon Diablo, and Gebel Kamil to demonstrate various iron meteorite crystallization features (the Gibeon sphere was part of MPOD 6/23/17)

two other spheres (a small Tsarev chondrite seen in Photo 2 and a smaller Aletai iron to the right of the Gibeon sphere in Photo 1)

some 1890s spearpoints in Photo 4 that were fashioned by Indonesian tribespeople from the Prambanan meteorite, and a modern Damascus letter opener created from a piece of Gibeon (the letter opener was included in my MPOD 6/23/17 post, and the spearpoints can be seen at MPOD 8/17/17)

a faceted Carbonado black diamond accompanied by some raw pieces (at the top of Photo 4)

examples of HED class meteorites: the main mass of the NWA 15805 howardite with a cut face showing its carbonaceous clasts (upper left in Photo 5); a slice and an end cut of the Jikharra 001 eucrite showing its two lithologies and the interesting graduated vesicles that grow larger as they traverse from the melt boundary to the edge of the crust (upper center of Photo 5); a large half-crusted unclassified eucrite with melt on the broken face (bottom center of Photo 5) that fluoresces a bright orange in spots; and a Riker-framed Tatahouine diogenite with a commemorative coin (most of which can be seen at the lower left in Photo 5 and more completely in the upper left of Photo 6)

a backlit Seymchan pallasite slice with LEDs that blink on and off at approximately 5 second intervals to show the translucence of the pallasite’s olivine crystals (partially seen at the upper right of Photo 5 – the case was unpowered when I took these photos, so it’s not shown backlit)

a backlit large Libyan Glass individual in Photo 7 (also with blinking LED backlighting to show the glassy nature of that tektite) along with a piece in a membrane mount showing evidence of having been worked (see MPOD 6/7/23)

carbonaceous chondrites in Photo 8 that include an oriented Murchison individual and a half-crusted Murray fragment next to an Osiris Rex pin that was given out by the mission team at ASU during an IMCA dinner talk about that project (the Murchison individual can be seen at MPOD 12/20/16 and the Murray at MPOD 1/16/24)

in Photo 9, several Martian meteorite slices in a Riker mount (NWA 4783, Dhofar 019, NWA 6963, Tissint, DaG 735, Los Angeles, and Zagami) and a large, fully crusted NWA 6963 individual in a caliper (the latter seen at MPOD 11/3/20)

a slice of the NWA 13478 lunar meteorite (a multi-colored feldspathic breccia) along with some old National Geographic miniatures commemorating the Apollo moon landings (also seen in Photo 9)

a complete Sikhote-Alin individual in Photo 10 along with a sliced and etched piece of shrapnel from that fall (artfully displayed sticking out of a small wood branch), and a chunk of a lark tree that, for almost 70 years, had grown around an embedded Sikhote-Alin fragment (the large individual was featured in MPOD 5/16/17)

an NWA 5549 anomalous silicated iron end cut displayed just to the left of the LCD display (seen in Photo 1; it was also featured in MPOD 2/15/24)

six halved unclassified stonies in Photo 11 showing a small fraction of the variety of chondrite meteorite interiors

four Riker mounts (Photo 7) with a few interesting meteorites: Chelyabinsk; Gujba; the aforementioned Tatahouine; and an NWA 10071 chondrite slice with obvious dense chondrules and a magnifier in front to more easily view them.

The 19" HDTV in the middle of the back of the case (seen unpowered at the center rear in Photo 1 and actually operating in Photo 12) displays a repeating six-minute slide show describing meteorites that uses some of the ones in the display as examples, and a scrolling LED matrix at the top of the right side of the case (not shown) offers nine humorous sayings (e.g., "Outer space real estate . . . free delivery!").

Finally, when covered with one’s hand, an optical sensor at the top center of the case (Photo 12), turns off the overhead LED light bar for 30 seconds while leaving the backlights on so that people can better view the translucency of the pallasite and tektite; it was also convenient for me when training a UV flashlight onto the unclassified eucrite to show how brightly it fluoresces. As a funny aside, the sensor’s housing looks a bit like a webcam, and I had one visitor a few years ago that refused to walk anywhere near the case because she didn’t want to be photographed (it would have been fun to know why – witness protection?!).

As pointed out in the previous bullets, many of the pieces on display have already been on MPOD; a few of the others will probably be posted in the future. If there are any in particular that folks would like to see, please leave a request in the comments and I’ll work on those first.

Enjoy!

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