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generally meets the third Wednesday of each month, August through May. January - April 2026: Meetings at Boal Hall (Boalsburg Fire Hall, 113 East Pine St., Boalsburg PA 16827). Google Map: Boal Hall May 2026: TBA All are welcome to attend our meetings! Parents must provide supervision of minors. Mineral collectors and rockhounds, earth scientists and dinosaur lovers will all enjoy our activities. |
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February 18th meeting: by Andrew Sicree, PhD Boal Hall (Boalsburg Fire Hall), 113 East Pine St, Boalsburg PA 16827 Google Map: https://goo.gl/maps/gtHjdzUgXbN9b5J8A 7:45 to 8:00 p.m.: Announcements, door prizes, sales about 8:00 p.m.: featured program The event has free admission, free refreshments and free parking (lot just east of Fire Hall along East Pine St.), and is open to all; parents/guardians must provide supervision of minors. Bring your friends and share an interesting evening. The modern screen-driven electronic world tends to decrease our abilities to focus on a subject for more than five- to ten- seconds at a time. Many rockhounds approach minerals with this handicap. Our February program will focus on the simple and easy procedures for appreciating and identifying minerals. Using simple tools and simple procedures, a mineral collector can observe common properties of minerals and, with a little luck, identify them! Science involves the weighing, counting, and measuring of time, space, matter, and energy in order to understand aspects of the Universe. As mineralogists, we mostly focus on matter and use a wide variety of techniques and equipment to measure the material aspects of minerals. But an amateur mineralogist or a collector does not need a lot of expensive machinery to begin. Simple tools such as a streak plate, a hammer, a glass plate, an acid bottle, a magnet, and a hand lens can be acquired for a modest sum. We will discuss common properties such as streak, hardness, luster, and cleavage, as well as some chemical, electrical, and optical properties of minerals. Some online presentations of interest: -------------------------- From NMS: Videos of many of our programs since 2020 are available here. -------------------------- From other sources: Jeri Jones' Zoom Rock Room: Weekly Zoom geology presentations, mostly related to Pennsylvania. https://www.youtube.com/@jerijones4202. The staff of the Penn State Earth & Mineral Sciences Museum and Art Gallery maintains a Facebook page. They also have videos on YouTube: Museum Gallery Tour: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5jJ4NR4ICoc National Fossil Day October 15, 2025 Earth Science Week October 12-18 The National Park Service's National Fossil Day will be Wednesday, October 15, in the middle of Earth Science Week, October 12 - 18, 2025, celebrating the theme "Energy Resources for Our Future." Educational materials are available. Videos of the 2020 Dallas Mineral Collecting Symposium are still available by following the links at https://www.dallassymposium.org/2020-dmcs/. VIRTUAL FIELD TRIPS, TOURS, GALLERIES, COURSES, MORE! With thanks for many of these to AFMS April 2020 Newsletter and Three Rivers Gem & Mineral Society of Fort Wayne Indiana's The Strata Data newsletter. Smithsonian Scroll down to see the tips before starting a tour. Yale - Peabody Museum of Natural History Via Rock & Gem magazine web site (thanks go to them); scroll down to find the image that links to the tour. South Dakota School of Mines & Technology - Mosasaur at Museum of Geology Scroll down to 'YouTube Playlist" Houston Museum of Natural Science Dinosaurs! Rice Northwest Museum of Rocks & Minerals Society of Mineral Museum Professionals (SMMP) Curator's Pick Gallery Curators choose their favorite specimens. Hosted by Mindat. SMMP Wulfenite Gallery Geology of the National Parks Penn State GEOSC 10 virtual field trips American Southwest Virtual Museum Virtual Museum of Minerals and Molecules Click on Displays at upper right Davidson Institute of Science Education, of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, has links to several more museum virtual tours worldwide, including natural history museums. Podcast of GEOL-101 type lectures (podcasts #1 to 28). Videos linked from the web site also; all by Nick Zentner of Central Washington University. For additional current news see our NMS Bulletin (link at top of sidebar at left). |
 NMS has in stock T-shirts in Galapagos blue, Texas orange (both shown here) and royal blue. 
A station at our Minerals Junior Education Day 
2020: CELESTINE: Pennsylvania State Mineral?See also Nov. 2020 Bulletin. 
Collecting crystals in a quarry 
We have NMS posters for sale! |
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