Moss Meteorite Thin Section

Of all the classes of meteorites I have photographed, the one with the most out-of-this-world features is the CV class of meteorites. Every time I look at one in thin section I am just stunned at how exotic the material appears. But, in close second I would say is the CO class of meteorites. And the Moss meteorite is a perfect example. The thin section appears to have a wonderful intricate structure, with tiny inclusions and CAIs scattered among a bizarre black matrix. On second thought I may come back to this slide for a panoramic plane visible light image. There is a STRESS (Spatio temporal retinex-like envelope stochastic sampling gray-scale from GIMP) album in the gallery which I think shows many features that are faint and appear blacked-out by the matrix. The STRESS method has been used in astrophotography papers to reveal details hidden to the human eye in typical image files and I think it can be helpful here too.

Moss Information at Meteorite Studies
Nice cross polarized pictures at Meteorite Times

Full Screen Meteorite Thin Section Panoramas:

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4x/0.25, calcium-aluminium-rich inclusion, carbonaceous, chondrite, LMScope, Nikon D810, northwest africa, polarized, scope2, zerene stacker

NWA 2364 Meteorite Thin Section

Thin section of NWA 2364. The matrix is very dark, an attribute of its carbonaceous composition. It contains some nice CAIs and chondrules. Readers should recall that some of this meteorite’s CAIs are the oldest dated matter in the solar system. Check out the links below to see the overlay of this thin section with the surface photos of the same fragment for awesome before and after comparisons.

Link to manually change the transparency of the thin section overlaid on the surface

YouTube video of a slideshow showing the transparency overlay

GIMP file allowing users to change the transparency overlay

View Meteorite Thin Section Panoramas:

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4x/0.25, calcium-aluminium-rich inclusion, carbonaceous, chondrite, LMScope, Nikon D810, northwest africa, polarized, scope2, surface, zerene stacker

NWA 2364 Meteorite Surface

NWA 2364 Meteorite Surface – Side A

NWA 2364 Meteorite Surface – Side B

The NWA 2364 meteorite contains the oldest known calcium-aluminum-rich inclusions in the Solar System. In other words, there is no “pristine” surviving matter within the sphere of human knowledge which is older than inclusions in this meteorite. Future discoveries may yield even more ancient material, however, until that occurs this remains #1.

The details are blurred due to two factors. The first being the low quality of my reflected light microscope and its optics. The second is due to the long ten second exposure I was required to perform to capture enough light for the images — this resulted in blurring due vibrations from my environment.

NWA 2364 Meteorite Information at Arizona Skies.