[meteorite-list] Biggest West heads north

[Galactic Stone & Ironworks]

Don is a class guy.  I'm glad he got it. :)

Congratulations Don.



On 4/13/09, Darren Garrison <cynapse at charter.net> wrote:
> Hope they don't drop a car on it:
>
> http://www.kansascity.com/news/local/story/1136629.html
>
>
> Hill County residents find largest rock yet from local meteorite shower
>
> http://www.wacotrib.com/news/content/news/stories/2009/04/12/04122009wacmeteorite.html
>
> By Ken SuryTribune-Herald staff writer
>
> Sunday, April 12, 2009
>
> MENLOW – The biggest piece discovered from the Feb. 15 meteor that broke
> apart
> near West now sits in a meteorite museum in Kansas, its owner happy to have
> acquired the space rock as well as the trust of the Hill County couple who
> found
> it and sold it to him.
>
> L.B. and Polly Etter were in church the Sunday morning when the fireball cut
> across the Texas skies. They didn’t hear the accompanying sonic boom that
> rattled houses around West. It was 11 days after the fall that L.B. Etter
> was
> driving his tractor along his farmland in Menlow, just west of Interstate 35
> and
> Abbott, when he spotted something out of the ordinary.
>
> “I’ve cut and bailed this patch of hay for years, so I knew that was
> something
> that wasn’t supposed to be there,” the 77-year-old farmer and rancher said.
>
> Etter had followed the news reports about the meteorite finds near West, but
> that was about seven to eight miles southeast “as the crow flies” from his
> place. Still, he kept the nearly 4-pound stony meteorite, dumping it in the
> back
> of his pickup to go on a fertilizer run to West.
>
> Women working at the fertilizer plant remarked that it was indeed a
> meteorite,
> and when L.B. returned home, his wife, Polly, wrapped it up in a towel for
> safekeeping.
>
> L.B. Etter then called some of the meteorite hunters and collectors who had
> advertisements in the West News seeking to buy pieces.
>
> Etter’s find — at 1,700 grams — is about 200 grams heavier than the
> next-largest
> rock that was purchased by meteorite hunter Mike Farmer of Tucson, Ariz.
> Farmer
> was among about 10 people initially interested in the chondrite. But it
> wasn’t
> until last week when L.B. and Polly Etter agreed to sell it to Kansas
> meteorite
> museum owner Don Stimpson for an undisclosed price.
>
> Farmer earlier had purchased his slightly smaller meteorite — he was told it
> was
> found near Aquilla — for more than $10,000, though he also declined to
> provide
> an exact figure. Stimpson said he knows of one other large piece from the
> “main
> mass” that another meteorite hunter has purchased.
>
> While all of the meteorite hunters were pleasant to deal with, Stimpson just
> stood out, L.B. Etter said.
>
> “He just seemed to be more down-to-Earth to me,” he said.
>
> Stimpson and his wife, Sheila Knepper, own the Kansas Meteorite Museum and
> Nature Center in southern Kansas. The museum’s claim to fame is that it
> houses
> the largest display of meteorites from a prehistoric fall near the
> now-defunct
> town of Brenham, Kan. The Brenham fall has the rarest of meteorites, a
> stony-iron mix called a pallasite.
>
> Even though the West meteorite, as it is being called, is a chondrite, which
> is
> the most common type of stony meteorite, Stimpson said he is thrilled to
> have it
> because it’s something new for his museum.
>
> “It’s a nice, pristine sample,” said Stimpson, adding that though it was
> found
> 11 days after the fall, no rain had fallen on it and it had not weathered.
> The
> pallasite fragments of the Brenham meteorite were dug out of the ground and
> often have significant rust, he noted.
>
> “A few months ago this rock was thousands of miles in space, farther away
> than
> the moon, and now here it is, just as it was found on the ground, with a
> surface
> of black, melted rock and sculpted dimples forged in a fireball,” said
> Stimpson,
> who was a biophysicist in Chicago before his interest in meteorites became a
> full-blown passion and second career.
>
> The largest pieces, like the Etters’ find in Menlow, will be west of I-35,
> Stimpson said. When a meteorite breaks up and scatters pieces across an
> oval-shaped “strewn field,” the smallest pieces land first. The bigger
> fragments
> with greater mass are at the end of the field. Birome appears to be the
> front
> end of the fall with pea- and pecan-sized fragments, Stimpson said, with
> Menlow
> at the back of the strewn field.
>
> Large pieces like the Etters’ rock could be acres apart from each other,
> Stimpson said. For now, the Etters’ chondrite has the distinction of being
> the
> largest from the West fall. It is on display in the Kansas museum, but
> Stimpson
> said he hopes to bring it back to West for an exhibition with other West
> meteorite fragments at a future date.
>
> He’s been in initial talks, but nothing is finalized.
>
> Stimpson expects there will be more discoveries, but the Etters haven’t
> heard of
> anyone else in their area finding meteorites. Stimpson admitted that to most
> people, it just looks like a black rock.
>
> “Some large pieces may be found, but with the vegetation starting to grow,
> searching will be difficult, and rusting will begin, but the material is
> still
> valuable and worth collecting,” Stimpson said. “More specimens will probably
> be
> found during fall planting.”
>
> L.B. Etter said he’ll be scanning his property a little more closely in the
> days
> to come.
>
> “If I see a black rock now, I’ll stop and look at it,” he said.
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-- 
.........................................................
Michael Gilmer (Louisiana, USA)
Member of the Meteoritical Society.
Member of the Bayou Region Stargazers Network.
Websites - http://www.galactic-stone.com and http://www.glassthrower.com
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