On the Trail of Stardust: The Guide to Finding Micrometeorites: Tools, Techniques, and Identification

Description

On the Trail of Stardust puts the heavens in your hands—in the form of cosmic dust, or micrometeorites. With this handy guide from the author of the international bestseller In Search of Stardust , Jon Larsen, you will learn how to find micrometeorites in your own neighborhood! Stardust—also known as micrometeorites—is the oldest matter anywhere. Nothing has traveled farther to reach Earth. For a century, scientists have searched everywhere for stardust, but only found it in remote areas like Antarctica and, more recently, outer space. Author and citizen scientist extraordinaire Jon Larsen was the first to find them in populated areas. With this book, you too can discover stardust as near as your own rooftop ! Following his successful debut, In Search of Stardust , Larsen turns his attention from explaining the formation and various kinds of stardust to revealing his methods and techniques for finding micrometeorites in a compact, durable guide. Larsen covers everything from the origins and formation of micrometeorites to assembling the simple array of gear needed to get out there and find stardust in your own neighborhood, rooftop, or rain gutters. Larsen explains the best places to look and offers step-by-step photo sequences of the techniques he has developed to assemble his collection of 1,500-plus verified micrometeorites (and counting). And you don’t need a multi-million-dollar scanning electron microscope to document your collection; Jon shows how to assemble a serviceable photo setup from easily accessible equipment. The book is capped off with a field guide of sorts that offers a taxonomy of the various types of micrometeorites , along with sample images, as well as the kinds of man-made and terrestrial spherules that stardust hunters are likely to encounter and how to identify them as imposters . Once thought to exist only at the bottoms of oceans and atop polar ice, it turns out that stardust is everywhere…and On the Trail of Stardust is your indispensable tool to finding it for yourself. Review: Very informative - Very informative Review: Great introduction to finding micrometeorites - This is a beautiful little book, full of amazing photos of all different types of micrometeorites and micrometeor-wrongs. You'll want to study all these photos before putting your gathered material under a microscope. I also appreciated the suggestions for how to document and track your samples, i.e. give each one a unique number/code and use a spreadsheet to hold all the particulars. I've been using plastic sandwich bags to hold my raw material, using a sharpie to mark the tracking number on the bag. On eBay I found reasonably priced graduated sieves, so I got 20 mesh (0.9 mm), 40 mesh (0.45 mm), and 80 mesh (0.2 mm) sieves. It is a lot easier to look at material that has been sorted by size vs. mixed sizes. I am probably going to get a 50 mesh sieve as well.