When Neil Buckland, a Seattle-based artist, he met a geologist named Tony Irving a few years ago, he had no idea he would launch an alien collaboration. Buckland was at the University of Washington photographing ultra-thin slices of meteorite for a project Irving was working on. The cut space rocks didn’t seem particularly exciting at first. Buckland then viewed the 30-micron-thick samples through a pair of polarizing filters. He was stunned by the vibrant collage of shades.
Inspired by the photographic possibilities, Buckland returned to his studio and set to work designing a camera system built around a microscope lens attached to a Pentax DSLR. To create his images, he captures a 2-square-millimeter section of a sample at up to 40,000X magnification, then moves the camera slightly and shoots another square. After capturing 300 to 400 of them, he stitches them all into one photo that can be displayed up to 12 feet wide. “It’s like a cosmos in a pebble,” says Buckland. “From an artistic point of view, I try to show the images as big as I am and as detailed as they are to create that existential shift in perspective.”
Polarized light can reveal different minerals within samples. if a meteorite it is rich in olivine, like the one at the top of this article, the light brings out greens, oranges and blues. For scientists, the configuration of minerals may hold clues to a meteorite’s origins, such as whether it came from an asteroid collision a billion years ago or was ejected by a massive impact on another world with a particular mix of atmospheric gases. . They’re also great to look at if you just want to distract yourself.