[meteorite-list] Suspected Meteorite Hits Illinois Home

From: Sterling K. Webb <sterling_k_webb_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Tue, 6 Mar 2007 18:41:16 -0600
Message-ID: <00ca01c76051$5147b5a0$4043e146_at_ATARIENGINE>

Hi,

    Regretting jumping on the Bloomington Bandwagon
(and then having to jump off right away), when I saw that
it had made up to Ken's great Meteor Wrong page:
http://home.earthlink.net/~magellon/ ,
I was glad to have fallen off the wagon.

    I took the JPEG and color corrected it. The color
temperature setting of the camera is off; the white of the
graph paper is yellow. The photographer probably took
it at daylight temperature but under cooler artificial
lighting, or just failed to do a white balance at all. Then,
I brightened it slightly to make dark detail easier to see.

    It has far too many sharp edges. To me, the rust
still looks like rust. In the video, Prof. Nelson calls
the rust "fusion crust." The video is bluer than the
photo (video shot indoors without auxiliary light is
always too blue).

    What does show in the video is that this is a flat slab.
Not just roughly flat, but a slab of an almost uniform
thickness along its broken edge, a characteristic of human
artifacting. Anyone ever seen an absolutely flat iron
meteorite? A broken 90-degree edge all around a meteorite
is more than unusual, too. The object has a big impact
crater of its own, just like those on Jeff Kuyken's
Sikhote-Alin.

    Prof. Nelson does also suggest it may merely be
part of a Romulan spacecraft... He doesn't say which
part.

    Well, that's why we have tests. It does sound like
this one (unlike the NJO) will get tested. Don't know if
they'll be able to establish Romulan origin, though.

    If you were a natural optimist, you could construct
a scenario in which this is the only surviving fragment
spalled off the back end of a totally consumed iron
body, riddled with graphite and troilite in flat plaques,
which would explain the flatness and the appearance
of an "attachment ridge" on the other side, which collided
with other fragments (which then burned up) to make
the impact pit on the edge... You can rationalize almost
anything.


Sterling K. Webb
-------------------------------------------------------------------
----- Original Message -----
From: "ken newton" <magellon at earthlink.net>
To: "Dave Freeman mjwy" <dfreeman at fascination.com>;
<meteorite-list at meteoritecentral.com>
Sent: Tuesday, March 06, 2007 4:43 PM
Subject: Re: [meteorite-list] Suspected Meteorite Hits Illinois Home


Hi,
In case you missed the video:
http://www.pantagraph.com/video/2007/030507_spaceobject/
In the video, Skip mentions fusion crust and thumbprints on the
side we did not see. Thanks to Dave, I wrote the David Proeber
and he sent this:
http://home.earthlink.net/~magellon/temp/03052007bb.jpg
Best,
ken newton


Dave Freeman mjwy wrote:

> Dear List;]
> Here is the email address of the photographer and story artist....
> You may all wish to ask him to follow up on the story to either
> disprove, or prove the rock in question.
> dproeber at pantagraph.com
> Best,
> Dave Freeman
> RS WY
>
> Ron Baalke wrote:
>
>>http://www.pantagraph.com/articles/2007/03/05/news/doc45ec62e14a6c2722505892.txt
>>
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Received on Tue 06 Mar 2007 07:41:16 PM PST