Zircon

Item Description

When it comes to crystallized Zircon, some of the most well-known examples in the modern ear are the red crystals from the Astore Valley in Pakistan. Most Zircon crystals you'll find on the market are either fairly small or rather rounded, but the Astore pieces are often very sharp, lustrous and well-formed with good sized crystals. This piece is a great example of this classic material featuring a few very sharp, lustrous, euhedral, tetragonal crystals with a wonderful strong red hue with slight gemminess on the edges when backlit on matrix. The entire group of Zircon crystals measures 1.6 cm long. There is a bit of an unusually white / colorless area around the terminations and a strong red hue along the prism faces. Faint yellow fluorescence can be seen under SW UV light. There is a contacted face on the front of the biggest crystal, so the piece is not perfect, but still a nice piece dating back years ago. Formerly in the collection of E. Henkel.
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.