Jim’s Fragments

Well another Tucson Gem and Mineral Show has come and gone. And I will not make you wait until the end for what I thought about this one. I think we did more good work as a business and had more fun and spent more great time with friends then ever before. I had a little nervousness about the trip

I got an email that there was to be a grand opening celebration and ribbon cutting ceremony at UCLA for the new Meteorite Gallery. It was taking place the next day. So I got my camera out and charged a couple batteries and put about 50 gigabytes of SD cards in the camera bag and rearranged my schedule. It was

Well, it would just seem wrong to report on vacation without something about meteorites. But, the fact of the matter is we did nothing meteorite related on vacation this year. We are so busy with meteorites the rest of the time that we have taken a big break from them for our autumn trips. I have spent the last several

California Meteorite Club Gathering As I write this it has been a week since the gathering of the California Meteorite Club down at Escondido. It was a great party. Sort of similar to what Paul and I did years ago. But, this had a much larger group of attendees and was an opportunity to personally meet many of the Facebook

My wife and I took a road trip recently up to Santa Cruz to see our daughter and granddaughter. We called her and said we were about twenty minutes from the hotel and she could head that way to meet us. She was picking us up as soon as we could check in and taking us to Lick Observatory over

With our new bimonthly schedule for magazine releases it is hard to believe that the final part of last year’s vacation is just now being put out to readers. Still excited about our success at Holbrook we had one more day at Meteor Crater and it was finally time to run up the road and see it. We had planned

This was quite an amazing year at the Tucson Gem and Mineral Show. We had gone with plans to get a big supply of meteorites for the next year and to have some fun. But, we had way more fun and found some really spectacular material. Our schedule was back to the regular week with all the meteorite related activities.

5:30 AM Wednesday morning the alarm went off though I was already awake. It had been a restless night of sleep. I guess I was pretty excited about the trip we were about to take. Paul was picking me up at 6 AM I had just enough time to set all my stuff outside on my front porch. We were headed to Phoenix

Over the last 25 years or so of professional writing I have reviewed books, software, and products on many occasions. Generally these reviews end up discussing the writing style, sturdiness of the product or the ease-of-use of the program. As I prepared to write a review on Geoff Notkin’s new book I knew right away that a discussion of the

If you go back through this feature’s back issues you will see that Paul and I have linked telescopes and meteorites together in many and interesting ways for years. We were regular sellers at RTMC the premiere amateur astronomy gathering in So Cal. We always have one with us for after meteorite hunting star gazing. So mix an opportunity to see telescopes, Geoff

Now that my garage is all set up I have room again to do jewelry. I know that I have mentioned it in passing, but in my youth I was a jeweler. I have done a few pieces each year for fun all my life. I am looking forward to doing a lot of jewelry in the future. With meteorites my main focus

It had been several years since I had been to the Griffith Observatory and my granddaughter had never been so we took her. My wife loves the place too so it was an exciting day for all of us. The parking on the day we went was difficult but as it turned out we did get a spot very close

I named this article as I did to avoid the problem of picking a name myself when it has not been officially named as of the time of this writing. My story of the meteorite fall near Coloma, California began with my wife asking if I had seen the video of the beautiful fireball that came over Nevada and California.

I left you all hanging a couple issues ago regarding a meteorite I bought at the Tucson Gem and Mineral Show. Well, I am ready to tell all now that it is done being classified. It was a strange stone, with a very weird looking outside surface. It was a funny color and not very magnetically attractive. Well, it was