For much of this summer I've been working on a project, which eventually I'll be posting in the Geology Thread -- a rock collection, with samples spanning as much of the geologic timeline as possible. I haven't been sharing these yet, but I thought today's find involved something interesting enough to post here.
It is a long and marvelous hike in, through dense dark forests, with giant ferns and mosses and mushrooms, and steeply upwards to where a huge slab of mountainside slid away, exposing tons of the underlying rock. The formation was deposited during the Eocene, some 45-55 million years ago. And it is absolutely filled with fossils.
The remains of palm leaves tell tale of a much warmer world.
Most of these are absolutely enormous (not to mention rare), and I leave them for future admirers. However, some of the smaller rocks can be sheared apart, and make for good collectables. The fossils are so abundant that almost any new cleavage plane will be covered in them:
My collection now is a few dozen samples strong, covering 11 unique intervals of Earth history. The first couple hundred million years are fairly easy to find here, and it's possible to go back almost 2 billion if one looks hard enough. Beyond that, things will prove difficult. This will probably be a project I continue for many years to come.
And of course, there are no rocks known to exist of the Hadean (or at least the oldest I am aware of is 4.03 Gya, according to wikipedia). The only things older are a few tiny resilient zircon crystals. Or, if you look to material which is not of this world...
awesome!! it would be awesome if you get simples from around the world. big discoveries happened with that. like the idea that africa and south america were 1 land
"we began as wanderers, and we are wanderers still" -carl sagan
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it would be awesome if you get simples from around the world.
For sure! I'll gather as much as I can locally when it's convenient, but also hope to get some things from all over, wherever my travels may take me. This project has been extremely fun for promoting the exploration of new areas -- many fascinating places I'd driven past and never known it, and many new places that are beautiful and would have never known about otherwise. It's very rewarding to peruse the geologic maps and read the studies, and then see the real thing out there in nature, and think about such deep time and the events that unfolded so long ago.
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like the idea that africa and south america were 1 land
Even more amazing when you think how recent that realization is to geology.
Antza2, Splendid..! I took the liberty to stitch the pictures together and enhance the brightness/contrast of the image, 50% reduced. It is just a quick and dirty processing. Have you ever considering stacking some shorter exposures ? I think you can achieve greater results.
So much stars..! Also , Pelican nebula, Deneb, North america nebula, etc.. Awesome skies Antza2
I'm no stacking expert at all, but I'd suggest the "DeepSkyStacker" software, there is plenty tutorials around to help you. You also would need calibration frames, some are pretty easy to take, others need a bit more set up. Depending on your computer power and number of frames to stack, reducing or cropping the original images may be a good idea.
I think I never shared those first and only planetary & nebula astrophoto I took last year through my window with a 900mm telescope, less than 10km from Paris, so light pollution is huge.. Stacking of 85 images for orion :
Very nice images you two! Love that eclipse sequence.
Antza2, another very good tutorial for 'the theory' of image calibration and processing can be found here (also linked through the DeepSkyStacker FAQ). I like this one as it keeps the explanation fairly simple, showing why we do each of these steps as well as examples of the effect they have on the image with different numbers of frames.
It seems like a daunting procedure at first, but it's actually pretty easy once you get the hang of it. And not all of the steps are required -- even just stacking the light frames will improve the signal to noise. But the more of the calibration you do and especially the more frames you take, the bigger the improvement will be. I think it's definitely worth trying out. This is what just 8 light frames and 8 dark frames can do... no bias frames, no flats.
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