Category: MagAO-X

I am sure a lot of you are tired of looking at the inside of your own homes, so I invite you to take a look inside of mine. Specifically at my rock collection. It may be hard to believe but mineralogy was my first science love. When I was really little (like 4) I was obsessed with crystals and I remember having some books on crystals and minerals that had stickers and little facts. My favorite childhood board game was unironically rocky bingo. It wasn’t until I was older that I was seduced to the side of astronomy by beautiful Hubble images. I am pretty sure what sparked my interest in crystals and minerals was Sailor Moon, a cartoon charater that uses a magic crystal wand to fight. Sailor Moon was a huge part of my childhood; recently my mom found a kindergarten journal and in it I said that my new years resolution that year was to become Sailor Moon.

A lot of us know Tucson as a major center for astronomy and optics in the United States. It is also a center for gemstone enthusiasts such as myself. For about a month starting from the end of January to mid February the largest gem show on Earth takes over a good chunk of the town. Surprisingly a lot of our group has never gone! Understandably the gem show is overwhelming, but here are some tips and tricks I have picked up as a novice collector and survivor of two gem shows.

So where to start?

If you want a bunch of sparkly rocks for cheap I recommend starting off with apophyllite. Apophyllite is a crytal that usually comes from India. Typical colors are white/clear and green. This stuff looks similar to quartz and is dirt cheap. My piece of apophyllite the size of my head was $35. You can find whole flats of this crystal for around that price at the gem show.

Apophyllite, especially green apophyllite is typically found in a matrix of stilbite. It has a waxy apperance and is usually a peach or yellowish color.

You can even find apophyllite as a matrix for other crystals. One of my favorite rocks I own is this spray crystal (I don’t actually know what the crystal is), on a green apophyllite matrix. This rock is awesome and not expensive ~$30.

Another great option for beginers is calcite. Calcite geodes look very similar to quartz geodes and are typically a clean snow white color. Calcite even fluoresces a bright pink color under black light! Calcite geodes the size of your fist should be around $5, and geodes the size of your head should be around $30.

Depending on what matrix calcite is on the crystal appearance can change drastically. I have found that when on a pyrite matrix they have wafer like crystals.

They can also come in funky pyramid crystals. The most expensive calcite specimens I have seen are honey calcite crystals that can grow in these perfect spikes. They cost hundreds of dollars.

Oh what about quartz Lauren? Surely it must be cheap right? It is so common!

Well I do in fact have a large collection of quartz, an entire shelf worth with some spill over onto other shelves.

Why I don’t recommend starting with quartz/amethyst is that it is super easy to get ripped off. This is because the price for quartz has sky rocketed due to a subculture that believes crystals have magic energy chakra. Most of my quartz specimens I have aquired through a hook-up from my mineral guy. It sounds sketchy, but he is a nice old man who sells rocks at the Saint Phillips Plaza farmers market and has super reasonable prices.

For instance this big boy geode here is over $100 (wholesale price!) at the gem show. I paid half of that which is kind of ridiculous. I think he was tired of lugging heavy geodes like this around. He said it was his last one and wanted it gone. This one wieghs around 25 pounds by itself. Imagine having to carry around boxes full!

So if you do decide to shop for quartz I recommend taking your time, and comparing costs from a lot of different vendors. Pricing for minerals is arbitrary after all!

To continue with quartz/ amethyst there are a lot of really cool specimens you can collect besides giant geodes. One of my favorite purchases this year’s gem show was this amethyst growing in a flower formation.

You can also get cactus formation:

And man made formations like this quartz crystal that has a secondary crystal artificially grown on top of it:

There are many other formation types and colors too for both natural and artificial quartz.

Ok so we covered some cheap options, but what if you want to start collecting seriously? Well its not exactly rock-et science, (pun credit to Logan), but it can be confusing. Pricing for minerals is for the most part arbitrary. There are some factors that I have seen influence price. The most obvious is size. If the specimen itself is large (I have seen geodes 10 feet tall!) or the crystals themseves are large typically the price goes way up. The other factors are color, structure, clarity, and general aesthetic. These are a bit harder to figure out. What I typically do is look up a museum quality specimen that serves as a standard for comparison. For an example I will use one of my favorite minerals called vanadinite. Vanadinite is a crystal found in Morocco. It has very cool hexagonal crystals. It is also really cheap to collect. Typically when a specimen is excellent or museum quality, the price range can be in the thousands depending on the type of mineral and the size. A fist size of excellent vanadinite is around $100!

This is a very nice specimen of vanadinite. It has a cherry red color, Large and distinct crystals, with no damage to the crystals themselves. Some examples of damage are chipping or scratches on the crystals. The crystals from an excellent specimen are a solid color, so they are not see through or have any cloudiness.

Now here are my junky vanadinite crystals:

The color is off, a brown/orange color, and the crystals are super tiny. This is one of the first rocks I ever bought, and I got completely ripped off because I had no idea what vanadinite was supposed to look like, or how common it actually is. I had never seen or heard of it before!

These specimens are getting better. The top one has two colors (yellow and orange) which is neat, but it is still off color and has tiny crystals. The one on the bottom has the desired color but the aesthetics aren’t great because the crystals are small and indistinct. These are about $10 rocks compared to the $100+ of an ‘ideal’ vanadinite.

This one is getting closer. The color is almost right, but still too brown, and a little cloudy. It is a larger piece, bigger than my fist, and the crystals are a decent size. This one was about $40, still way below the ‘ideal’. If that is too much work for you, don’t spend more then $30 on a single rock you don’t know about and you can’t go too wrong.

Arizona is a great place to collect because we have a lot of unique minerals coming out of Arizona mines. The most common are azurite and malachite that both have copper in their chemical makeup. They are found in a lot of the copper mines around. Both minerals are brightly colored, making them great display rocks.

Another copper based crystal I have is atacamite which is found in the Atacama desert in Chile, where the Magellan Telescope is!

Our state mineral is wulfenite. Some of our mines in Arizona produce the ideal standard the world compares samples to. Unfortunately I don’t have any blog worthy samples of it (only really junky stuff), because even decent wulfenite is very expensive.

Lastly, Arizona is known for our petrified wood! Some of you may know that Logan and I took a trip to Petrified Forest National Park right before the coronavirus quarantine went into effect.

We learned that Arizona has a special type of petrified wood called rainbow petrified wood. The primary color is typically a beautiful red, with blacks, yellows, blues, greens, and whites mixed in. Of course I had to buy a piece in the gift shop :).

I wish I could say these are the only rocks I own, but I have many more that didn’t make an appearance in this post. Hopefully this helps you start your own collection :).

Song of the day: When I am feeling emo I like to stare at my rocks.

As the quarantine continues with working from home on my simulation code, it’s been day-in-day-out of detective work tracking through countless cases of “Why does my output look horrible / makes no sense?”. The solution usually arrives in the form of opening the wrong file because I formatted poorly, units are missing, and a lot of Stack Overflow. I’m working on being a better programmer day-by-day.

Many years ago, back when internet artists used to blog on a platform called LiveJournal, I discovered this electronica and folk music band named Detektivbryan (Swedish for “The Detective Agency”) on an artist’s page. There’s something very whimsical about their music that I enjoy. I selected this song because it encompasses my feelings how coding review is similar to detective work and the level of bumbling I feel when my errors are so simple.

Back in college, I used to listen to Thao & The Get Down Stay Down regularly. I haven’t kept up with their newer stuff, but they were recently in the news for the creative use of Zoom videoconferencing to make the video for their new single: Phenom. The song struck me as dissonant and strange at first, it’s been growing on me with every listen. Please enjoy it as your song of the day.

My household grew by one yesterday!  Meet Star:

She’s a baby African Pygmy Hedgehog. She was born on Feb 20th, 2020, and is still so so tiny! I got her from a local breeder, Tucson Hedgehogs, who take extraordinary care of their babies, training them and adapting them to being held, and make sure they are going to a good home by inspecting habitats before approving adoptions. The whole operation was professional and made me feel confident adopting a hedgehog from them.

Here’s the habitat I made for her out of a $10 kiddie pool:

Hedgehogs run like crazy at night, so the big pool was a good option to give her lots of room to run. The running wheel was popular last night. Hedgehogs are prey animals, so the thing they most want to do is burrow and hide, which she has plenty of opportunities for here. This morning I found her under the blue snuggle sack (not inside?). That’s why they love toilet paper rolls too, they stick their little heads inside and push them around and run around with them. I’ll try to get y’all a video or something when she does it, it’s pretty great. There is also a thermometer and heat lamp. Hedgehogs try to hibernate if it gets too cold, and that can be bad for their health, so hedgie owners have to be sure their environment is kept warm enough.

Here’s some more hedgehog facts. They are insectivores, and they’re actually immune to scorpion venom! They’re nocturnal, but they can be adapted to operate somewhat during the daytime, and can also be trained to use cat litter! But otherwise they’re not very smart, so that’s about all the training we can expect really. They’re also nearly blind, but their hearing and smell are top notch. They do this strange behavior that animal behaviorists aren’t quite sure why, called self-anointing. When a hedgie smells or tastes something new and exciting, they froth up and lick their spit all over their quills. It’s funny and kinda gross.

The popular pets in America are the African pygmy variety, which are related to but very different from their European cousins. African pygmy hedgies actually don’t exist in the wild, they’re only kept as pets!

Here’s some more Star glamour shots.

• 

• 

• 

Lastly, if you’ve been to my house or known me for a few minutes, you might know I have a bit of a thing for hedgehogs. So I wanted to finish off with a snapshot of the other hedgehogs in my house…

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

That’s not close to all of them. People give me hedgehog things all the time, and I do nothing to discourage this behavior. In my former life as a middle school teacher, my students learned of my hedgehog habit and the gifts started rolling in. It was magical. (Pro tip: if you ever need to entertain ~30 twelve year olds for about 5 minutes while you wait for the bell to ring, I can wholeheartedly recommend hedgehog videos on YouTube. Also OK Go videos.)

---

In honor of how cute Star is, song of the day is Cute Explosion by MrWeebl:

In the past week the heat has been slowly ramping up and it will continue to go up the next couple weeks. So staying home and inside is actually not that bad. One thing that I do have noticed is that we are going through our supply of food slightly faster than normal. It seems like I am quite easily distracted by snacks. Luckily, in the past week we had an opportunity to order some items from a Dutch food import shop. So today I am going to share some typical Dutch food and snacks. Of course I will go through the not so famous examples, because everyone knows about Dutch pancakes, raw herring and liquorice.

The most important part of a Dutch diet is bread. According to statista we are eating 60kg of bread on average per year, that is more than double the US average https://www.world-grain.com/articles/8702-three-bread-trends-shaping-american-diets. This also leads to aisles full of products that you can put on your bread in the Netherlands. One of our favorite products is hagelslag (sprinklers) and we do not kid around with them. There is a large variety of hagelslag, from sweet to sweeter to sweetest. Mainstream sprinklers are chocolate sprinklers and you can find them anywhere. Whenever you find that chocolate is not really your flavor you can just switch to fruity flavors (who am I kidding, there is never enough chocolate).

Another option when you do not really know what chocolate to pick exactly is the mix, where we have just mixed different flavors of chocolate.

We have three flavors of chocolate sprinklers and two fruit flavors, and now you may think that is it. But, luckily we are not even halfway through all sort of sprinklers. If the sprinklers are to small for you, there is always the xxl hagelslag. And of course this one also comes in many flavors.

If you do not like these 3D shapes of hagelslag you can always go for vlokken (flakes). Vlokken are, well, flakes of chocolate.

All these types of sprinkles come from the invention of the anise sprinklers that were created in the early 20th century. Dutch tradition dictates that you secretly place a tray of biscuits with ‘muisjes’ (anice sprinklers) in the common area of your workplace if you are expecting a baby. Then the other people will try to guess who placed it there. Another quirk of the muisjes is that you usually pick the color of the gender of you baby, pink for a girl and blue for a boy.

And then finally we end up with the luxurious line of sprinklers which have been created in last couple years. If you are feeling that the normal chocolate is too sweet and therefore for children, we have the perfect type for you. You can always enjoy a more adult flavor of extra pure chocolate. This means that you get your hagelslag with a higher concentration of cacao or a little bit of coffee flavor.

So by now I hope you are convinced that hagelslag are a very good idea and that you can create an endless variety. That is it for today and I will be picking up my new box of hagelslag that just came in!

---

For the song of the day I picked shipwrecked by Alestorm as we are all shipwrecked at home.