QUINCY, ILL. -- Remember that large fireball that streaked across the night sky on April 14th?
A St. Louis man found a piece of it and now wants to share the rock from outer space with you.
Karl Aston doesn't golf or bowl. But he has a hobby that keeps him pretty busy. He's a meteorite hunter and collector. He has quite a collection. Some of them he's found, others he bought on E-bay. He even has a piece of the moon that fell as a meteorite. A couple of months ago, he headed up to southwest Wisconsin where a large meteorite fell back in April.
"I found one and it turned out to be the fifth largest that was found," says Aston.
Aston tells me this particular meteorite fell to Earth at a shallow angle and dropped pieces over a large area, so it was hard to find pieces of it. However, he's confident that what he has is from outer space.
"It's black. It's got a melted crust on it. There are some flow features. It has a chip where you can see the inside. There's no doubt it's a meteorite," says Aston.
The chip gives you a glimpse of what's inside, and you can definitely see shiny specks of metal inside. As you can imagine, finding a meteorite isn't an easy task. Aston tells me he and the other meteorite hunters walked ten to 20 miles a day and spent about 100 hours walking fields in Wisconsin. All he found was this one rock. Aston doesn't see that as a disappointment at all. In fact, he spends some of his free time with people who think they've found a meteorite. He was in the Tri-States this week, meeting with people who thought they had rocks from outer space.
"Of people that have rocks they think are meteorites, the rule of thumb is about one in a thousand are actually meteorites," says Aston.
Aston calls those rocks, meteor-wrongs. If you'd like to see the meteorite Aston found in Wisconsin, it's going to be on display this summer at the St. Louis Science Center.
If you'd like to enlist the services of Karl Aston to confirm what you think is a meteorite, you can call him at 314-614-9118 or e-mail him at stlouismeteorites@gmail.com
TV Station Profiles & Public Inspection Files forKHQA