Pretty Colors

February 22, 2013 9:15 PM

A gallery of gorgeous thin-section photos of meteorites.
posted by Scientist (18 comments total)

Gorgeous, but who decided a bismuth pink background was the way to go?
posted by sandettie light vessel automatic at 9:18 PM on February 22 [1 favorite]

Beautiful! Thank you for sharing.
posted by sweetkid at 9:25 PM on February 22

Hey, at least it's not bismuth-pink and also a Flash interface designed for a race of intelligent but inscrutable aliens. ;-) My biggest beef, personally, is that the images don't come in desktop resolutions.
posted by Scientist at 9:25 PM on February 22 [3 favorites]

Why do I get the feeling one of these will end up as the cover art for the next Peter Gabriel album?
posted by davebush at 9:30 PM on February 22

Amusingly, this is totally the kind of thing my group would use as cover art for our next CD.

Bookmarked!!
posted by blurker at 9:37 PM on February 22

Pretty colors... out of space.
posted by Artw at 9:44 PM on February 22 [3 favorites]

All the pretty colors, not just alien green.
posted by BlueHorse at 9:49 PM on February 22

Less an album cover than a hanging backdrop for a Dead or Floyd cover band. Just needs one of the littel bubbles to morph occasionally.
posted by OHenryPacey at 9:56 PM on February 22 [1 favorite]

Gorgeous photographs but this page makes my eyes bleed.
posted by KeSetAffinityThread at 10:28 PM on February 22

I'd like to see something similar, except done with meteors.
posted by mazola at 11:39 PM on February 22 [1 favorite]

These remind me of the paintings of Jerry Garcia. Far out, huh?
posted by hardlyable at 8:09 AM on February 23

Out of this world!
posted by blaneyphoto at 8:23 AM on February 23 [1 favorite]

I tell you, I saw its heart beating.
posted by mule98J at 9:30 AM on February 23

Could somebody please point me to information on how these were made and viewed?
I've made numerous thin sections, looked at hundreds (thousands?) of them and I'm blessed if I can figure out what minerals I'm looking at here
(Full disclosure: Senility may be the problem.)
posted by speug at 9:53 AM on February 23

Speug, here is a blog site with his about page. Scroll down past the header and first few paragraphs for pics of his microscopes and how he uses them. The rest is beyond me, but cool pics!
posted by Marie Mon Dieu at 11:35 AM on February 23

He says that he makes use of polarizing filters and such, though he doesn't go into a lot of detail about it. The iridescence in the the thin-section pictures reminds me a lot of stress marks on glass viewed through a polarizing lens. I would not be surprised if that had something to do with the startling colors that he gets out of these images.
posted by Scientist at 2:40 PM on February 23

Nice!
posted by homunculus at 4:11 PM on February 23

Thank you Marie Mon Dieu (neat name BTW) the key is:
Do not look at these images as a reference to identify thin section minerals.
He is manipulating colors for effect and the minerals do not display the standard colors observed with the standard setup.
posted by speug at 2:30 PM on March 5