Rock Show

 Natural Wonders

I last attended the New Jersey Mineral, Fossil, Gem & Jewelry Show in 2018 before the covid disaster. Four years later, fully vaccinated and masked, it was time to cautiously venture out and visit this enjoyable rock show again. Avoiding most of the Interstate 95 nightmare, the drive on alternate routes from VA to NJ wasn't bad. Shortly after entering the exhibit hall I was awestruck by beautiful aquamarine crystals from Pakistan.

I'd love to purchase one of these beauties for my collection, but, as you can see from the $7,500 price tag on the last specimen above, they were out of my price range! Single aquamarine crystals were less expensive, but still too much for me.

Moving on from the aquamarine display I browsed lots of exhibits with quality specimens - still expensive even with 50 percent off!

I've given up trying to buy some rhodochrosite. Check out the price on the following exquisite specimen. 

A few vendors sold meteorites. Here are interior slices of an iron/nickel meteorite showing the famous Widmanstatten pattern. 

A dinosaur fossil display was popular with kids.

A fossil wooly rhino skull from Siberia was displayed at one of the nicest fossil and mineral exhibits. (The horns are replicas.)

Fabulously detailed Jurassic fossils from the German Solnhofen Limestone were amazing! 

The second shrimp fossil above would be a wonderful showpiece if I had a place to put it and could afford the $650 price. Another fossil spectacular was this crinoid priced at $5,500.

In addition to fossils, minerals, and gems, many other vendors had interesting colorful displays.

A few vendors were selling gongs. Apparently, exposing your body to vibrations from a large nearby gong has some kind of "healing/calming" effect. At least that's how several women seemed to be treating it. The women would ask a gong vendor to hold the vibrating gong about 9 inches from the their torso while they turned like you would turn your body slowly around while taking a hot shower. Then the women would say something like, "Very nice." Some of these gongs were really impressive featuring elaborate designs. The sounds were quite loud and penetrating. The Nepalese exhibit had the biggest gong hanging from a stand. On the floor directly in front of this gong was a large ringing bowl about 24 inches in diameter. A few women were participating in some kind of ritual activity where they would stand barefoot in the ringing bowl while someone simultaneously struck the giant gong and activated the ringing bowl. This large gong was amazingly loud! I'm guessing the women experienced some intense internal effect from all the vibration. At any rate, the incredible acoustic blast caused nearby vendors to complain because it was driving away customers.

Some modest specimens I purchased for my collection are pictured below.

The first specimen, peridot on basalt, brought to mind a section of pallasite meteorite I obtained years ago. Both show peridot together with materials from inside their parent bodies.

This sample of malachite from China has a velvety glow under strong light.

Bright yellow orpiment is a compound of arsenic and sulfur. This sample is from the Senduchen Mine in Yakutia, Siberia.

The tiny green crystals below are a relatively rare gem garnet called uvarovite from Sarony in Russia's Ural Mountains. It was named after a Russian nobelman, Count Uvarov, in 1832. The green color comes from chromium.

Under a microscope some individual crystals can be seen below. The crystals are supposed to be dodecahedral, but I can't see any pentagonal shapes characteristic of platonic dodecahedrons. The plane faces appear mostly square to me.

I can't resist the beauty of raw opals whose colors change when tilted in sunlight. These samples are from Ethiopia.

It was hard to record red opal colors with my phone camera in the picture above. So I put one opal piece under a microscope where red highlights were more easily captured.

Finally, this nice specimen of marcasite on calcite crystals really sparkles under strong light.

I enjoyed the show, but don't know if I'll return again. It's a long trip with diminishing returns. I've no room for large specimens, and can't afford to buy the nice ones anyway. I wore a mask but still developed a sore throat a few days after returning home - the cost of leaving my safe covid cocoon.

Sunspot Movie

Disappointing Result

For a bit more than an hour during my last solar imaging session on April 20th I captured an image every 60 seconds hoping to catch some interesting activity near multiple sunspots 2993, 2994, and 2995. The time lapse animated GIF's shown below were constructed from the 65 images obtained. (It takes a while for the GIF's to load, so be patient.)These animations run in a repeating 13-second loop. They compress 71 minutes of actual time into about 13 seconds of movie time. In the wide frame view above you can see the c-shaped dark filament to the left of the central sunspots move like a snake toward the largest umbra. A quick bright eruption bursts out at the very beginning of the animation, but quickly disappears. Other more subtle changes happen in areas between umbras. Focus attention on individual small areas as the movie repeatedly cycles to see changes. The next cropped animation makes this easier.Catching a truly dramatic flare or major filament eruption is really a matter of luck. Obviously, I wasn't lucky during the 71 minutes I observed. Unfortunately, atmospheric seeing conditions worsened as the minutes passed. Image details are sharp near the beginning but fuzzy towards the end because the atmosphere was increasingly unsteady. Finally, here's one more slightly enlarged version to help distinguish detailed changes. (Click on the video to see more detail.)The animations above were made by capturing one video clip every minute from 9:49 am to 11:00 am EDT (13:49 to 15:00 UT). I eliminated only one particularly fuzzy image from the sequence near the end and added one extra image to the start before the small white initial eruption occurred. Each individual movie frame is a stack of 50 frames from a 500 frame video clip. Ultimately, I'm disappointed by the fuzzy results and lack of drama in the final results.