SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
Outer space is filthy, littered with asteroids, dust. Maybe some sheet music for BJ Leiderman, who writes our theme music. Some of that material enters our atmosphere, and if it makes landfall, it's called a meteorite. At the Cincinnati Observatory later today, collectors will be showing off some of their treasures from outer space. Bill Rinehart from member station WVXU reports.
BILL RINEHART, BYLINE: Meteorites come in all shapes and sizes, but to collectors, they're all special. John Ventre usually keeps his locked away in a safety deposit box, but he does bring them out occasionally.
(SOUNDBITE OF ZIPPER)
JOHN VENTRE: Since you're here...
RINEHART: He opens a bag and holds up a silvery slice of jagged space rock against the light. It's about 6 by 4 inches and an eighth of an inch deep.
VENTRE: And what's neat about this particular one is - I'm holding it up, and you can see pieces of olivine, which are translucent green gems.
RINEHART: Eighty-nine-year-old Ventre first started collecting when he was in college and bought some meteorites at a museum gift shop. He's donated some pieces, including a couple of 25-pounders, to the Cincinnati Observatory, but still has more than 100 in his own collection.
VENTRE: The smallest one - gee, I don't know - would be about the size of a fingernail, I guess (laughter).
RINEHART: Some collectors, like Dusty Segretto of Louisville, Kentucky, have samples a lot smaller than that. He's set up a microscope inside a coffee shop and shows some to the store's art curator, Beth Akins.
BETH AKINS: Good. What you doing?
DUSTY SEGRETTO: I've got the collection from the roof.
AKINS: Here?
RINEHART: Segretto had scooped up dirt and debris from the roof of the shop.
SEGRETTO: This is eight micrometeorites.
AKINS: No. Get out.
SEGRETTO: And you can look at them under the microscope, too. Look.
AKINS: OK.
SEGRETTO: So these are...
AKINS: Oh, they're beautiful.
RINEHART: Another slide is crowded with grains of sand, a couple of thread-like structures and something that looks like a potato chip.
SEGRETTO: That's another thing about looking through the dirt, is you find so many other cool things.
RINEHART: Segretto says he spends about 16 hours a week searching.
SEGRETTO: This is really a signal-to-noise game, where you go up to a nice flat roof. Anything up there is either from wind or from space. You gather up some material, and you separate it with a magnet.
RINEHART: He says that magnet will pull out anything with iron in it. And from there, it's like panning for gold.
SEGRETTO: Imagine you had a clear bucket with clear water and sand in it, and you swish it all around. The sand is going to fall really quickly to the bottom, right? It doesn't take very long. But anything that's not heavy and dense is going to float. And so you keep pouring and pouring until just that heavy stuff remains.
RINEHART: He looks through what's left. At a glance, it can be difficult to tell a meteorite from a normal Earth rock. But under that microscope, space dirt doesn't look like anything from Earth.
SEGRETTO: They really stand out. They look different. They look beautiful. They have a structure to them. They have forms and colors that you don't see in terrestrial dirt because they went through a process via its entry to the Earth that terrestrial material never really goes through.
RINEHART: Segretto says he loves looking for micrometeorites because there's always the chance he'll find something no one has ever seen before. He'll share his prizes this weekend as other collectors, experts and enthusiasts come together over space rocks.
For NPR News, I'm Bill Rinehart in Cincinnati. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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