Mysteries So Bright

Now here is an amazing free source of outer space material.  I heard of this years ago, and tried it briefly back then, finally trying it again yesterday.  We got our first rain in weeks and after reading several nice articles on how to do it, I collected two jar-full samples of the downspout water. (This photo is from Steve Spangler’s blog referenced below).

I used a coffee filter to collect the dust from the water, and dried the filter in our toaster oven (low setting).  Then, instead of separating out the iron particles with a magnet, I used two stick-um notes to collect all of the particles.  The water was mostly clear because the roof had already been rinsed off before I started collecting.  Since a good percentage of the meteorites are nonferrous types, they would be missed by the magnetic method of separating meteorites from earthly particles.

This week I found a wonderful buy on two medical-grade binocular microscopes, making this exercise possible.  From my first jar of water, I am pretty sure I found one nice micrometeorite, but it was so tiny, it popped out of view when I approached it with tweezers under the scope, and I wasn’t able to recover it.  It looked just like some of the pictures in the links below.

I haven’t searched the 2nd sample yet.  I will post the results later.

Here are some of the links I got from Google “collecting micrometeorites”:

A Meteorite Hit My House! | Steve Spangler’s Blog

Educator’s Guide to Micrometeorites

Collecting Micrometeorites.

Classroom – Collecting Micrometeorites

Fire in the Sky: Collecting Iron Micrometeorites | Geekdad from Wired.com

Boyd