Craig Moody looks through a magnifying glass at what appears - to the average person - to be just another rock.
But the rocks that the Callander native collects are actually meteorites from space.
“Meteorites I found fascinating the first time I actually touched one as a child in a museum and I thought, this came from outer space, it hasn’t been here until it decided to drop in on our planet and I never considered collecting until I bought my first one online and I’ve been hooked since,” said Moody.
Moody has been collecting these rare jewels from outer space for about a decade now and has about 100 pieces in his out of this world collection. One of his prized pieces is a piece of the buzzard couple meteorite which fell in Saskatchewan in 2008.
“It was very well publicized, a police dashboard camera caught it on re-entry and they were able to find it within a week and soon as the first piece was found, then they know where to look and they just start grid searching the area looking through the field but they are so rare its like finding a pebble on a football field looking through a football field, just to find this one because the field can be up to 20 square miles in size and you are looking for 20 kilograms worth of material over a 20 square mile field,” explained Moody.
Moody says he’s looked in the forest for the extreme lucky chance that he stumbles upon a meteorite, but that hasn’t happened yet.
“In the bush the best I could hope for is a cold find, where you just happen to look at a rock that looks kind of funny and one in a thousand chances it might be a meteorite,” he said.
“Here in North Bay we are sitting right in the middle of three ancient impact sites. Sudbury Basin was hit by a piece of rock that 16 cubic miles in size. If there was any life on the planet at the time it would have been wiped out because of that. Lake Wanapitae is only 5 miles wide but it was hit 37 million years ago.”
Moody likes to share his unique collection once a year as he will be bringing his meteorite collection for the third straight year to Callander on February 25th for Kids Day at Callander Community Centre.
