Museum of the Cosmos
museumofthecosmos.org
Museum of the Cosmos
@museumofthecosmos.org
Educational project founded in Oklahoma with the goal of making the world a better place by helping to make quality educational resources more available to the public.
I captured a long-exposure, time-lapse video of the Aurora Borealis visible from central Oklahoma, USA the other night.

#Oklahoma, #photography, #AuroraBorealis
November 15, 2025 at 6:56 PM
This is a piece of malachite (Cu2CO3(OH)2), a copper-containing mineral that has been used as a pigment, a copper ore, stonecarving, and decoration for many thousands of years.

The striping comes from t
being chemically-precipitated from mineral-rich water.

#minerals #geology #coolrocks
February 12, 2025 at 3:58 AM
Copper nuggets like this piece from Michigan, USA, were tilled up and deposited on the surface by glacial activity some 14,000 years ago and provided several native cultures in North America with a great source of raw metal without mining or smelting.

#Michigan #metallurgy #geology #Nativehistory
February 10, 2025 at 9:49 PM
Reposted by Museum of the Cosmos
We CT scanned thousands of vertebrates from US natural history collections and made them freely available. Countless people have used the data for research (>200 pubs) and to learn anatomy/morphology.

www.morphosource.org/projects/000...
January 29, 2025 at 1:01 AM
Part of the collection is entirely digital, like this 3D whaleshark I carefully modeled, textured and animated years ago and uploaded to sketchfab.

I might add a tiny diver in there for scale someday.

#sharks #digitalexhibit #3dmodeling #blender #nature #ocean
Whale Shark (Rhincodon typus) - 3D model by MuseumoftheCosmos
The Whale shark is the largest living species of fish, with the largest confirmed specimen measuring 12.6 meters (41.5 feet) long and weighed around 23.5 tons (47,000 pounds). Living in tropical ocea...
sketchfab.com
January 27, 2025 at 10:23 PM
The colors on that bismuth crystal from the last post are due to thin layers of oxide interfering with the wavelength of reflected light.

The pure metal itself is naturally silvery looking, like the interior of this broken block of bismuth.

#earth #elements #chemistry #crystals
January 26, 2025 at 8:25 PM
Bismuth crystals like this form naturally under the right conditions when molten bismuth cools, though these conditions rarely, if ever, exist in nature.

The myriad of colors is due to oxide layers on the surface, the metal is naturally silvery in color.

#earth #elements #chemistry #crystals
January 26, 2025 at 8:01 PM
I have a backlog of items, mostly fossils to digitize and upload to sketchfab, including this Pennsylvanian (323.4-298.9 mya) plate full of fossil seed fern and giant horsetail bits.

#fossils #paleontology #paleobotany
January 25, 2025 at 7:49 PM