After many months of hardcore petrography, trying to take the most informative and yet aesthetically-pleasing photomicrographs, verifying uncertain end-member compositions on the microprobe, and compiling and hand-typing in data from a wide variety of sometimes contradictory sources, the fruit of my labor of love is finally finished: the minerals from my Petrography of Exotic Rocks seminar are all together (in 3 volumes) in a new e-book series available online from the Apple iBooks Store.

This series is a photographic atlas of minerals viewed by transmitted light microscopy.  Divided into the three optical classes (isotropic, uniaxial, and biaxial… a function of crystal system, of course), each volume features tabulated optical and ancillary physical properties of both common and rare species, information on distinguishing characteristics and similar species, as well as accompanying full-color, high resolution images taken under both plane-polarized light and crossed polarizers.  For minerals where pleochroism or dispersion is notable, additional images (including conoscopic optic figures in some cases) are included to illustrate these properties.

 

                              

 

Click on any of the links or cover illustrations above to take you to more detailed descriptions of these books on itunes.apple.com (which will open in a new window). Currently, these e-books are only available in Apple iBooks format.  Hence, they require either an iPad with iBooks 3 (or later) and iOS 5.1 (or later), an iPhone with iOS 8.4 (or later), or a Mac with iBooks 1.0 (or later) and OS X 10.9 (or later).  If you’re interested, please do check out the screenshots there, and if you have the compatible hardware/software as noted above, also feel free to download free samples to check out.  As I’ve accumulated some new really exciting samples since I first published these e-books back in March 2015, I hope to eventually put together one or more supplemental volumes featuring additional common and rare minerals, more featured localities and geologic environments, and many more photographs. It’s also my hope to try at some point to make these books available in additional formats, so they can be accessible to a wider audience… at the very least, I’ll probably try to make PDF versions available.