SUPERMOONS, CREDNERITE, AND BLACK COFFEE

 

My posts this summer/fall have been non-existent as I noted in my last and only post.  I finally have conquered my office, sort of, and now the garage awaits me---a never ending task. One can never “catch up” with organizing the garage, at least not me ( and virtually all my friends). Unfortunately, that mighty office conquer has not left much time for minerals except for a few days this week. I am now, and have in the past, been paying for the sins of my youth, along with most of my male friends, as we all make numerous visits to the dermatologist. No hat wearing while riding a tractor in the hot Kansas summer sun. So, this current surgery involved removing carcinoma lesions from my scalp, and the side of the nose. Not much fun after the injected numbness wore off as each demanded 5 or 6 sutures. Of course, “today’s hurt” is much better than the alternative!

But there are joys in life as this last month has been exciting for ole dedicated moon watchers like me. The home we purchased here in the Village of Holmen, WI, has tall red pines and a deciduous understory as the eastern property border. The western part of the neighborhood  also has trees that block a view of the horizon. However, in the “middle” there is a huge expanse of “sky” that is visible. In the mornings I plop my rear on a deck chair, sip my hot, bold, black Kona coffee and watch the sun filter through the pines at sunrise. The birds seem happy, although not noisy as in the spring, but certainly they visit the large feeder. In the evenings I switch sitting areas and hit the rocking chair facing west with a cold IPA at sunset. A nice relaxing beginning and end of the daylight.  BTW, daylight seems to be rapidly disappearing as we slide toward the Winter Solstice.

Observing the night sky is the time to contemplate and celebrate being alive. We have little light pollution here and the noise pollution is very low except for occasional Friday night football games. Last September 17^th I enjoyed the night of the Harvest Full Moon, a Supermoon. And, to add visual joy to the experience, there was a partial lunar eclipse starting at about 7:40 pm CDT and peaking two hours later. Only about 8-10 percent of the upper moon was covered at the peak eclipse but still, that was impressive . The Harvest Full Moon received its name from the fact that before massive mechanization farmers could stay in the fields long after dark. I certainly remember working late in the evenings picking corn in the moonlight for my Uncle farmer. It was money for a poor kid but I must confess I always was on the lookout for wolves and other giant critters!

On October 17^th 2024, the largest Supermoon of the year popped up as the Hunter Moon. The name seems to reference the beginning of the hunting season in olden times when wild game played a major part in the food chain of rural folks. Of course, the moon  appeared “almost full” on a couple of nights before and after the 17th, and I enjoyed watching it move over the trees into my open sky. Several recent nights around the 17^th brought honking geese moving south to better feeding grounds, perhaps due to a little cold snap of 27 F. It seems I don’t need much activity to give me satisfaction; so, the moon cycles and the colorful turning trees make for a “good time” that I intersperse with observations of my minerals. 

Fortunately, discovering “new” minerals in my drawers is always exciting. Recently I pulled open a magic drawer and discovered the cache of perky boxes I snagged last winter in Tucson. The cache of about 30 micros contained mostly rather common minerals but it is hard to complain about the price—ten bucks for the quart bag. I have not examined each specimen but have noted the identifications and collecting localities are attached to all. Unfortunately, the collectors, according to hand printed labels, are varied and unknown.

But common or not, a semi rare “jewel” periodically shows up. Today I pulled out crednerite, a copper manganese oxide (CuMnO₂) with a genesis of oxidation of ores of copper and manganese (that seems reasonable!). The Type specimen was found in the Glockensstern Mine in Thuringia, Germany. Although not always a valid/true indicator, the number of photos displayed in MinDat seems to “say something” about the commonness (is that a word) of minerals. Crednerite displays only 22 photos with 20 from Europe, one from Australia, and one from the U.S. So, it seems rare or at least uncommon. The one U.S. photo is from the Maid of Sunshine Mine in the Gleason Turquoise District in Cochise, County, Arizona. However, Anthony and others, in their seminal 1995 edition of Mineralogy of Arizona (I do not own the latest edition) stated crednerite from “Cochise County, Bisbee, Warren District, identified from an old specimen in the collections of the University of Arizona (UA 6993), Dallas Shaft (Graeme, 1993)”.

The Gleason-Courtland mines (Turquoise Mines) are not far from Tombstone and a few years ago I drove over to see about exploring some old dumps of former turquoise mines. Not a smart move as the claims are private and permission was turned down in a very plain and informative manner. OK, just an ole rockhound wanting to enjoy some outdoor life of his later years!

The Maid of Sunshine is one of eleven mines usually called the Leadville Group, after a Mining Company. The exposed rocks generally consist of a basal Cambrian sandstone/quartzite covered with a shaley- limestone overlain by  thick Carboniferous limestone. Monzonite intrusions, sills and dikes associated with a larger pluton, cut through the Cambrian units and are responsible for bringing in mineral-laden water. At the Maid of Sunshine Mine a large thrust fault shoved the Cambrian Bolsa Quartzite over the much younger Carboniferous Abrigo Limestone. The copper minerals at the mine generally were deposited along the fault plane. Several hundred to several thousand tons (estimates) of copper ore were extracted from the Leadville Group Mines, mostly in the early 20^th Century, and transported by rail to a smelter in El Paso. This mining history noted above was taken from a report authored by S.W. Greenidge in 1917 and reprinted as a digitized file in the Arizona Department of Mines and Mineral Resources Mining Collection located at:   

http://docs.azgs.az.gov/OnlineAccessMineFiles/M-R/MaidOfSunshineCochiseT19SR25ESec16.pdf

 MinDat lists 31 known minerals from the Maid of Sunshine with the photos dominated by blue, green, and blue-green minerals such as azurite, malachite,  and cyanotrichite. One small specimen provided a photograph of crednerite, a steel gray to black mineral with a metallic luster and a hardness o ~4.0 (Mohs). Although the specimen seems to consist of stacked platy crystals. At any rate, my specimen is so tiny that I simply can’t determine the crystal morphology. 

Mass of crednerite crystal in a multimineral matrix. Width of largest mass is ~1.4 mm. Check out the crednerite photo at the Maid of Sunshine gallery.
 

Two different rotated views of steel gray crednerite ??crystals with the upper photo showing a “group” of spheroids.  Width FOV .7 mm.

Unknown mineral in the crednerite matrix. Width FOV ~.5 mm. I could use some help on this one. I presume some sort of crystalline quartz.