Tuesday, January 24, 2012

Moar Mineral Mashing: Calcite

Okay, let's try something that shows cleavage in some non-orthogonal orientations. Calcite is a good one:

4 comments:

  1. This is the best one yet. I like the fact that you didn't appear to hit the calcite quite as hard - I think it made for a better chance to see the cleavage as it split apart.

    I can't wait to see you edit in one of these mineral mashing videos (or all of them?) run in reverse. :-)

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  2. I also like it because the smaller rhombs are very symmetrical. I think I over-cranked the hammer with the galena because I had been trying to smash olivine earlier and I really needed to wail on it. I was a little amped up.

    I may try to use a ball-peen hammer next time to keep the fracturing minerals in better view... I am an experimentalist after all.

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  3. I concur with Ron - best yet.
    What about increasing the depth of field. It's frustrating to have the pieces (relevant data) go out of focus immediately after the initial impact.
    I'm sharing this and the galena one with my students!
    Callan

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  4. Callan,
    Depth of field is the magic variable... I need as much light as possible to get small apertures, and these were shot using 1,000W of tungsten lights - I'm at the limit of how many photons I can throw into the scene for right now. However, it's good to know what works and what could be improved. Once I get a few kilowatts of LED lights I can probably shoot with more DOF.

    Having larger samples would also work, but I'm loathe to smash my larger euhedral crystals right now...

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