Recent content by Andy Resnick

Snow finally stopped after 10 hours: Not a record or anything, but still...

Fenite, Fen complex: Dark and light green pyroxenes, albitized gneiss, 2 prominent carbonatite veins. Carbonatite also occurs dispersed throughout. Beginning from the side with the 2 veins, the veins are separated by albitized K-feldspar, anhedral apatite, and large poikilitic grains of dark...

Still snowing hard this morning:

These are better- same everything, just monochrome b/c white balance failed:

It's snowing here, now: Shot @ 105mm f/2 1/25s. To get a sense of the volume of snow coming down now, the depth of field (the amount of visible snow) in these images is only 40 cm, and the tree is about 10 m away.

Had brief windows on back-to-back nights, just enough time to fill out my image of the Auriga nebulae: Deets: Nikon D810 + Nikkor 400/2.8 (@ f/4) mounted on Losmandy GM-8. 13 s subs, total integration time = 5 hours (3 fields of view, panorama). Stacking/mosaicing/etc. done by AstroPixel...

Chilled carbonatite magmatic boundary adjacent to fenitized gneiss (country rock), Fen complex. “Fenitiztion” is specifically defined as the alkali metasomatism of the silicate country rock (e.g., gneiss) surrounding a carbonatite intrusion, characterized by the gain of alkalis and loss of...

Transition rock showing fenitized gneiss adjacent to chilled margin of carbonatite magmatic intrusion. Fenite. Type locality: Fen Complex, Telemark, Norway. The main minerals in the primary gneiss are sub- to anhedral grains of alkali feldspar, microcline, plagioclase, quartz, and a...

It's been cloudy for the past week and will be cloudy again for another; in between was one clear night spent imaging a somewhat-tight group of objects in constellation Auriga @ 400mm; this is the result (annotations from astrometry.net): It's not much to look at now (only 2 hours integration...

I'm out of the office for a few weeks, so I have to reach into the back catalog for a few weeks: Juvite. Type locality: Juvet, Fen Complex, Telemark, Norway. A local name for a coarse-grained variety of nepheline syenite in which K-feldspar is more abundant than Na-feldspar (albite)...

Last night was the first clear night in a while- I had a chance to image Jupiter @ 800mm: From the top, a stacked image of 40 subs (1/80 s each) to create a good exposure of the planet. Next, a stack of 30 subs (1.3 s each) to create a good exposure of the 4 Galilean moons. The next 2 are...

Another carbonatite margin: Carbonatite, Fen complex. Right side is carbonatite; equigranular subhedral grains of calcite, massed cumulophyric grains of apatite within an aphanitic matrix, massed crystals of phlogopite (possibly indicating C2 metasomatism) displaying reaction rims/coronas...

Annual pre-christmas trip to b. a. Sweetie Candy Company, a candy warehouse: They have all the PEZ (even @ 15mm there's too much to fit in the frame):

Carbonatite, Fen complex. The Fen Complex experienced pluri-metasomatic processes consisting of at least two main phases of metasomatic alteration (Fenitization-1 and Fenitization-2), which can be broken down into a detailed chronological sequence of seven events: three widespread aureole...

Carbonatite, Fen complex. This sample displays a transition from, on one side carbonatite, then, moving from left to right, an apparent band of small crystals of phlogopite intermingling with a bluish amphibole (tabular habit), either riebeckite or arfvedsonite, and further from the carbonatite...