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Białystok is a meteorite that fell to earth on October 5th, 1827 near Białystok, current-day Poland. It is n Howardite achondrite, one of the rarest classes, and only 4 kg of material was ever recovered after it broke up during its impact with the Earth. Of the 11 witnessed falls of howardites, Bialystok is the fourth.

If you look closely at the above picture, you will notice a wonderful ridgeline of once-liquid fusion crust running roughly north to south across the dark continent.

A wonderful written documentary of this fall can be found in the May 1995 issue of Meteorite! Magazine. So little material of Bialystok is preserved in collections today, that this richly crusted fragment weighs more than the combine total of all the pieces in Poland!

The specimen label numbered 1032/3 is from the Natural History Museum at Humboldt University in Berlin. I am told that this very piece is referenced in the "Gesamtkatalog der in der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik vorhandenen Meteorite" by Günter Hoppe, issued in Wissenschaftliche Zeitschrift der Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Math.-Nat. R. XXIV (1975) 4, 521pp.