[meteorite-list] Orionoid micrometeorites

From: b1dunovant at aol.com <b1dunovant_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Mon, 22 Oct 2012 11:07:02 -0400 (EDT)
Message-ID: <8CF7E7E0671F479-D30-18A19_at_webmail-m081.sysops.aol.com>

Hello Listees. I hope everyone enjoyed the weekend.

I live in the Chicago suburbs and was not able to view the Orionoid
meteor shower due to overcast skys and horrible light polution from the
city. Knowing this would be the case, Two weeks ago while cleaning the
gutters on the house I rinsed the entire roof off several times so that
the amount of shingle material left in the gutter was less and less
each rinse, until finally there was hardly anything coming off.
Yesterday I affixed a fine screen to the end of my drain shoots and
collected all the material that I was rinsing off. I soaked all the
material in anhydrous alcohol for several hours and dried then dried in
silica gel. What I had was a mix of different shigle materials, tiny
twigs and hopefully something of interest.

I use a rare earth magnet to seperate the material into a pile of
magnetic and a pile of non-magnetic materials. The magnetic material
was them put in a petri dish and was sorted throught under high
magnification for hours removing small magnetic materials in the rough
shingle grit. After working all day doing this seperation i was left
with stuff that left me with my jaw dropped.

What i was looking at were aerodynamiclly shaped black metalic pieces,
some perfectly round, some pancake shaped, some bars, a couple buttons
with rollover all around such as you would see in some indochinites,
and even severl tear-dropped pieces with unbroke tails. Under even
higher magnification you could see surface details and even multple
skins on some of the tear drops and bb's. Along with them there were
also bb's that looked slightly oxidized and were an orange color I
assume were missed during the initial roof rinses, however the the
mass majority were shiny black and had very fine sufrface detail under
magnification.

Is there a chance these are condensents of vaporized material from the
Orionoid shower? If not why such the high concentrations of unoxidized
aeroforms so dilicate I doubt would still have such perfect tails after
my rigourous rinsing ahead of the meteor shower.


Email me off list if your interested in pictures of what I've described
above. I would love to hear some feedback from the community! I should
have some pictures up for the masses to view shortly.

Regards,

Brandon D.
IMCA# 9312
Received on Mon 22 Oct 2012 11:07:02 AM PDT