I’ve added a page that will feature some ~billion-pixel images of meteorites I’ve taken with electron and optical microscopes using this or this technique. The first one is a classic: Renazzo, the type sample of the CR chondrites. Renazzo fell in Italy in 1824 with a total mass of 1 kg. Check it out!
Draconids
The Draconid meteor shower peaks tonight as the Earth sweeps through primordial dust spewed from comet 21P/Giacobini-Zinner. Ernst Zinner was a pioneering researcher in the study of presolar grains, a brilliant scientist and wonderful man who spent most of his career in our lab here at Wash U. Comet 21P is named for Ernst Zinner, but a different Ernst Zinner, a German astronomer, who made the second observation of 21P in 1913. Clearly this is a charmed name for space science!