Planet Stamps – And Pluto Too

Pluto Explored

The first-day-of-issue dedication ceremony for the Pluto—Explored! and Views of Our Planets Forever stamps took place on May 31 before a crowd of 500 at the World Stamp Show-NY 2016.

The Pluto—Explored! souvenir sheet contains two stamp designs, an artist’s rendering of the New Horizons spacecraft, and the spacecraft’s image of Pluto taken at its closest approach.

Honoring Pluto with its own stamp helps skate around sentimental attachments to the former ninth planet, now reclassified, which might have prevented some fans from enjoying the Views of Our Planets stamp set, with just eight planets…. *sniff*

Views of Our Planets

13 thoughts on “Planet Stamps – And Pluto Too

  1. I totally misread the stamps as “Pluto – Exploded!” and was very worried for a second lol

    Those are some purrrrdy planets :3

  2. @Darren Garrison – that is the most helpful and adorable rock buying website I have ever seen thank you! I am mostly more a fan of semi-precious stones and other pretty mineral oddities but meteors are cool and I know a certain dad who might appreciate a space rock or two 😀

  3. Sunhawk: You can get into the hobby cheaply if you are willing to buy common meteorites from the Sahara desert (called NWA for North-West Africa.) Some of those can be sometimes be picked up for tens of cents per gram (back during the biggest glut of availability, I bought them by the hundreds of grams for as little as 6 cents a gram.) Other meteorites can run from a few dollars per gram to a few hundred dollars per gram, up to the really rare types which can go for hundreds of thousands of dollars per gram (usually sold as barely visible specks of dust.)

    If you are worried about fakes, look for members of the IMCA (International Meteorite Collectors Association–it is fun to stay at the IMCA) membership. They police their own.

    ETA: a good “starter meteorite” is NWA 869. Really cheap, but really nice. (The only reason that it is cheap is because literally tons of small fragments have been recovered.)

  4. @Darren Garrison – thanks for all the helpful information! 🙂 I will keep that starter meteor in mind if I ever get a collection going (have a bit of a space issue in my current place that I hang my hat but in the future hopefully things will improve and I can get all the space rocks I want :D) and I am always a fan of governing bodies that help prevent fraud and fakery 🙂

  5. I have a bit of a space issue in my current place that I hang my hat but in the future hopefully things will improve and I can get all the space rocks I want.

    Are you familiar with gem jars? Just one of those cases will allow for a collection of 50 micromounts that can be hung on a wall like a photo or stored elsewhere using a minimum amount of space. (Never mind me–just enabling addictive behaviors in others.)

  6. @ Darren Garrison – oh that’s a really neat idea! I tend to be more of a bigger stone collector, like stuff the size of your fist (or my fist, I have very small hands lol) but I can appreciate a neat and tidy display like that! 😀 The last rock I got was for my afore-mentioned dad, got him a nice chunk of bismuth because I love it’s 90 degree angles and the rainbow sheet it gets 🙂

    I actually inherited a small rock collection with some pieces more gem jar sizes from a friend of mine, when I get the time I will probably get a gem jar set to put them properly together, right now the poor things are hanging out in a carboard box in a series of smaller boxes :X

    This reminds me of the neat earrings I got from Alaska when I was there last summer, in Skagway were a number of local artists who specialized in carving mammoth ivory so I have two slender salmon earrings carved out of the stuff, interesting idea. I also have been looking for a while for a decently rainbowy ammolite pendant 🙂

  7. I tend to be more of a bigger stone collector, like stuff the size of your fist

    Which is a nice luxury, when available. But with some meteorites in the collector’s market, the entire supply on the planet is the size of your fist. I have a few crumbs (literally crumbs, rattling around in the bottom of a medicine-style gel capsule) of the Kobe meteorite. It fell through the roof of someone’s house in Japan. Scientists collected 136 grams of fragments. They did some good science on them (peruse the google hits) but none of that (less than fist-sized) amount is available to the public.

    But a meteorite collector had the smarts to buy the vacuum-cleaner bag from when the wife of the household cleaned up the mess of plaster and such. He then went though the full contents of the bag under a stereo microscope picking out meteorite crumbs (identifiable by appearance and by being attracted to magnets.) He came up with a couple of grams (or less) of crumbs and priced them at (IIRC) $10,000 per gram. They were desirable to people who specialize in collecting witnessed falls, or “hammerstones” (those that strike human structures) or meteorites from Japan. (I got my sample from the guy who collected it in a trade, I didn’t pay that kinda price for it.)

  8. @Darren Garrison – that is a whole other world of fandom, I love it lol It’s interesting how rocks can appeal to people for different reasons, for me it’s how they look but for you and other meteor collector’s it’s more about where it came from. I’ve seen one of the rocks from the moon (it’s at the Ontario Science Center) and it looks pretty much like an ordinary rock, just that it’s also within an alarmed inch-thick plastic container lol

    For some reason your story about the Japanese meteor makes me think about opals in Australia and how so many people just start digging holes, hoping to come across some opals and the funny thing is that they DO find opals sometimes! lol

    “Grey market meteors” is a trip of a concept heh heh

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