Celestine on Sulfur

Item Description

Beautiful, classic, pastel silvery-blue colored prismatic crystals of Celestine measuring up to 1.7 cm, sitting atop contrasting light golden-yellow colored Sulfur matrix. The Celestine crystals are highly lustrous with glassy faces, and most of them are undamaged, though there are a few small contacts. Overall the piece is very showy and presentable, and it's a lovely example of these well-known classics.
From the collection of Armon McPherson, a retired physicist, now living in New Mexico. Armon received his PhD from North Carolina State University in 1985, and worked at the laser laboratory at the University of Illinois at Circle Center. In the summer of 1997, Armon moved to the Argonne National Laboratory where he worked at the Advanced Photon Source, then the world’s largest synchrotron facility dedicated as an x-ray source. In 2001, he was asked to join a team at Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque to conduct laser research for DARPA. Finally, staying within Sandia, he transferred to the Z Facility, the world’s most powerful x-ray facility. He retired in the spring of 2017. Armon's introduction to mineral collecting came in the 1980s during graduate school when he attended his first mineral show. He took up the hobby of faceting gems, and focused his early collection on gem crystals, and later transitioned into collecting non-gem species. We are proud to offer specimens from his worldwide mineral collection here for you.