67Dart273
Well-Known Member
Not for that kind of money, anyhow
http://spokane.craigslist.org/clt/5079900243.html
Large Meteorite for sale - $550 (Spokane / Pullman)
condition: excellent
make / manufacturer: God
model name / number: Nantan meteorite fall
size / dimensions: 785 grams / 1.73 pounds
safety tips
prohibited items
product recalls
avoiding scams
Large Iron Nickel "Nantan" Meteorite (785 grams / 1.73 pounds) with a wonderfully interesting history - farmers in Nantan China witnessed and documented this large fall in May of the year 1516 (Ming Dynasty).
I must reduce my meteorite collection - tough deciding which I "need" the least... vs bills 'needing' paid now.
Good solid Nantans generally sell on eBay for a dollar per gram, and dealers charge more. I paid exactly a dollar per gram for most of my Nantans, with the vendors eating the eBay and Paypal fees. I thought I would experiment trying a cheap direct sale to someone local, passing on the various 'fee' savings.
The surface of this Nantan is pretty uniformly melted, thin fusion crust remaining on a little of the surface. Considering the average meteor we see is grain-of-sand size, and marble-size you talk about for days - this several-pound-rock white-hot surface flashing away must have been spectacular for the Chinese farmers to witness.
I personally imported this meteorite from China, and would like to pass this along to an experienced meteorite collector, someone who can recognize a Nantan - no first-time-buyers please. $550 bargain price is firm. Included is a museum display card and information sheet. Email any questions and please include the answer to this math quiz to prove you are not a spam-bot. Five plus two equals ________.
~~~~~~~~~
And for the curious ~ Nantan Meteorites story:
Originally Found: Quanxi ('guang-she') Province, Nandan (Nantan) County, China
Date of Witnessed Fall: During the year 1516, in the Ming Dynasty.
Recorded History: In May 1516, the Chinese year Jiajing, during the reign of the Chinese Emperor Zhengde, it was written in the local records that "stars fell from the northwest; five to six fold long, waving like snakes and dragons. They were as bright as lightning and disappeared in seconds." Like burning cinders, each of the thousands of meteors soaring above Nantan that night burned super-bright as they momentarily super-heated in the upper atmosphere, then dropped to the ground later to be found as burned rocks in the farmer's fields.
It is estimated that the original meteor weighed more than 9,500 kilograms, including what may have been lost to climatic exposure and weathering during the past 500 years. (The remaining unweathered and semi-weathered stocks are probably less than half of the original fall.) When it hit the upper atmosphere, it exploded into thousands of pieces falling over an elliptically shaped strewnfield 17 miles long by 5 miles wide, trending northwesterly
between the towns of Lihu and Yaochai, located NE and ESE of Nandan, respectively.
From 1516 until 1958, local Chinese farmers considered the meteorites a nuisance because they interfered with farming, and were a back-breaking pain to move. Sometimes the larger meteorites (50kg and up) were just left in the fields; where and when it was feasible (and the stones not so heavy), the farmers would move the smaller meteorites, these "heavy stones from heaven," to rising stone piles at the ends of planting rows. Over the years, with each
succeeding generation of farmers in the Nandan County district, the origins of the meteorites were slowly forgotten, and the meteorites were seen as just
piles of useless stones, too heavy to move. So they mostly just stay there.
This was true until 1958. When Mao Tse Tung created the great Chinese Cultural Revolution, known as "The Great Leap Forward," he encouraged everyone to become socially active, and not to waste materials but to conserve them, and thus they could contribute a great deal to the cause of building a "New" China. Many people became fanatic about this, and many strange incidents happened during this time.
One of these incidents was the mad rush for steel and iron scrap, to help bolster their fledgling steel industry. The farmers knew there were many piles of rust-covered rocks that they and their ancestors had pulled from the fields, and that they were made of some kind of metal. So as part of their contribution to national growth, they offered up these heavy iron rocks.
However, when the smelters tried to melt the rocks, they ran into a problem: The iron in these stones just wouldn't behave like normal iron, resisting even the highest smelter temperatures (the special iron-nickel composition of the Nantan needed much higher temperatures to melt it, much higher than the small local wood and coal burning smelters could provide.) It was then that the government sent experts to Nandan where, through researching village records and talking with the farmers, they determined that these uncooperative chunks of what was thought to be iron ore were actually of extraterrestrial origins.
This is the history of one of the rarest records of a witnessed meteorite fall known, making Nantan meteorites some of the most famous extraterrestrial objects in the world.
http://spokane.craigslist.org/clt/5079900243.html
Large Meteorite for sale - $550 (Spokane / Pullman)
condition: excellent
make / manufacturer: God
model name / number: Nantan meteorite fall
size / dimensions: 785 grams / 1.73 pounds
safety tips
prohibited items
product recalls
avoiding scams
Large Iron Nickel "Nantan" Meteorite (785 grams / 1.73 pounds) with a wonderfully interesting history - farmers in Nantan China witnessed and documented this large fall in May of the year 1516 (Ming Dynasty).
I must reduce my meteorite collection - tough deciding which I "need" the least... vs bills 'needing' paid now.
Good solid Nantans generally sell on eBay for a dollar per gram, and dealers charge more. I paid exactly a dollar per gram for most of my Nantans, with the vendors eating the eBay and Paypal fees. I thought I would experiment trying a cheap direct sale to someone local, passing on the various 'fee' savings.
The surface of this Nantan is pretty uniformly melted, thin fusion crust remaining on a little of the surface. Considering the average meteor we see is grain-of-sand size, and marble-size you talk about for days - this several-pound-rock white-hot surface flashing away must have been spectacular for the Chinese farmers to witness.
I personally imported this meteorite from China, and would like to pass this along to an experienced meteorite collector, someone who can recognize a Nantan - no first-time-buyers please. $550 bargain price is firm. Included is a museum display card and information sheet. Email any questions and please include the answer to this math quiz to prove you are not a spam-bot. Five plus two equals ________.
~~~~~~~~~
And for the curious ~ Nantan Meteorites story:
Originally Found: Quanxi ('guang-she') Province, Nandan (Nantan) County, China
Date of Witnessed Fall: During the year 1516, in the Ming Dynasty.
Recorded History: In May 1516, the Chinese year Jiajing, during the reign of the Chinese Emperor Zhengde, it was written in the local records that "stars fell from the northwest; five to six fold long, waving like snakes and dragons. They were as bright as lightning and disappeared in seconds." Like burning cinders, each of the thousands of meteors soaring above Nantan that night burned super-bright as they momentarily super-heated in the upper atmosphere, then dropped to the ground later to be found as burned rocks in the farmer's fields.
It is estimated that the original meteor weighed more than 9,500 kilograms, including what may have been lost to climatic exposure and weathering during the past 500 years. (The remaining unweathered and semi-weathered stocks are probably less than half of the original fall.) When it hit the upper atmosphere, it exploded into thousands of pieces falling over an elliptically shaped strewnfield 17 miles long by 5 miles wide, trending northwesterly
between the towns of Lihu and Yaochai, located NE and ESE of Nandan, respectively.
From 1516 until 1958, local Chinese farmers considered the meteorites a nuisance because they interfered with farming, and were a back-breaking pain to move. Sometimes the larger meteorites (50kg and up) were just left in the fields; where and when it was feasible (and the stones not so heavy), the farmers would move the smaller meteorites, these "heavy stones from heaven," to rising stone piles at the ends of planting rows. Over the years, with each
succeeding generation of farmers in the Nandan County district, the origins of the meteorites were slowly forgotten, and the meteorites were seen as just
piles of useless stones, too heavy to move. So they mostly just stay there.
This was true until 1958. When Mao Tse Tung created the great Chinese Cultural Revolution, known as "The Great Leap Forward," he encouraged everyone to become socially active, and not to waste materials but to conserve them, and thus they could contribute a great deal to the cause of building a "New" China. Many people became fanatic about this, and many strange incidents happened during this time.
One of these incidents was the mad rush for steel and iron scrap, to help bolster their fledgling steel industry. The farmers knew there were many piles of rust-covered rocks that they and their ancestors had pulled from the fields, and that they were made of some kind of metal. So as part of their contribution to national growth, they offered up these heavy iron rocks.
However, when the smelters tried to melt the rocks, they ran into a problem: The iron in these stones just wouldn't behave like normal iron, resisting even the highest smelter temperatures (the special iron-nickel composition of the Nantan needed much higher temperatures to melt it, much higher than the small local wood and coal burning smelters could provide.) It was then that the government sent experts to Nandan where, through researching village records and talking with the farmers, they determined that these uncooperative chunks of what was thought to be iron ore were actually of extraterrestrial origins.
This is the history of one of the rarest records of a witnessed meteorite fall known, making Nantan meteorites some of the most famous extraterrestrial objects in the world.
