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come on people show us your stuff somebody should have saw, found, experienced something interesting in this hobby.

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I have a piece of Trinitite - which is a remnant from the first atom bomb test at the Trinity test site at Alamogordo New Mexico in 1945.

When the atomic bomb detonated, it sucked thousands of tons of desert sand and debris into the mushroom cloud. This debris was then irradiated and melted, before it rained back down to Earth. It fell like blobs and hardened on the desert floor. The side facing up is smooth and the bottom side has an impression of the ground. The greenish tint is from iron in the desert sand. The copper-orange tint is from copper in cables and within the device itself - these are elemental remains of the actual bomb, rigging, and gantry. This particular piece weighs about 4 grams and is about the size of a half-dollar.

It is mildly radioactive, but it is safe to properly handle in small quantities for limited periods of time. All of the very dangerous isotopes that were present had short half-lives and were long ago reduced to relatively-harmless decay products which emit only low-level radiation.

Up until the early 1950's, the public could visit the site and collect this material, and a sizaeable amount made it onto the collector's market. Then the government stepped in, fenced off the site, and bulldozed all of the trinitite into a big hole and buried it. It is now illegal to remove tritinite from the site, but it is legal to possess samples that were procured before the prohibition. It is now quite scarce and hard to find.

"...I have become Shiva, destroyer of worlds..." - Robert Oppenheimer.

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Michael Gilmer - Member of the Meteoritical Society & Collector of Falling Stars.



Galactic Stone & Ironworks - Buy/Sell/Trade Meteorites, Moon Rocks, Mars Rocks, & 35 different falls and types!

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