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Pete writes:

Unclassified Chondrite (NWA)

This is another "Unclassifieds are like a box of chocolates..." meteorite. There was no hint of its awesomeness until I polished it and viewed it under my microscope.

What first came to mind was it's like a mosaic of orange Life Saver candy smashed up and congealed again, and some fields reminded me of Kandinsky's abstract paintings - he used a lot of orange.

It has a beautiful crystalline matrix of varied orange colours, some sparkles of ruby red from deeper within, and on the more transparent portions scattered throughout is a beautiful opal-like schiller effect that can be seen to some degree on every picture (best illustrated here in pics 3 and 7).

Some altered chondrules are still visible, tar-black melt pools and veins, and no Fe-Ni flecks visible so far in what I've cut up. It has only a light attraction to a neodymium magnet. The fusion crust is relatively unweathered and no caliche, so I'm doubtful the orange is a result of oxidising.

If you'd like to see more high resolution chondrules and matrix of this meteorite, I have made an album here

All pictures are wet for enhanced details. Scale is 2.5 mm across, unless otherwise stated. Your keyboard arrows will make it much easier to flip through the album pictures.

  Click to view larger photos     #1     #2     #3     #4     #5     #6     #7     #8