Microcline var: Amazonite

Item Description

Amazonite is at its best from the various pegmatites in Park and Teller County, Colorado. These historic specimens have been the standard for this blue-green variety of Microcline for decades. This piece is a beautiful, big robust cabinet display piece featuring a predominant blocky crystal of a soft blue-green hue, measuring 9.2 cm, associated with a few additional Amazonites, and no matrix. Very minor Quartz can be seen on the piece as well. There are some contacted areas, so the piece is not damage-free, but rarely does one find Amazonite specimens with crystals THIS size from Colorado, and the piece is complete with ZERO repairs, which is noteworthy as these specimens often are found in multiple pieces that have to be glued back together.
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.