A Day Out With The Equinox

[F350Platinum]

14 minutes ago, NCtoad said:

Love that silver button!   I don’t think I’ve ever seen a solid silver button posted before.  Rare find indeed!

Thanks NC, I thought it might be a Reale at first, but it was even more exciting to find one of these. I only know of one other detectorist pal that has found one, but he has hunted since he was 8.

Buttons are as interesting as coins to me, thankfully the cherry pickers leave enough of them behind to keep me coming back! 😎

[schoolofhardNox]

2 minutes ago, F350Platinum said:

Thanks NC, I thought it might be a Reale at first, but it was even more exciting to find one of these. I only know of one other detectorist pal that has found one, but he has hunted since he was 8.

Buttons are as interesting as coins to me, thankfully the cherry pickers leave enough of them behind to keep me coming back! 😎

Nice hunt. Buttons were irrelevant to a lot of detectorists in my area back in the day. They used to toss them back in the hole when they found them. They were only after Large cents and silver! I had a good friend who (once enlightened 😄), remembers throwing away a GW button before he knew what they were. I love buttons, since I dig any non ferrous and have found many good items because of previous people leaving them. That place looks like a great spot, especially if you can find the 1600's sweet spot. Good luck there.

[F350Platinum]

7 minutes ago, schoolofhardNox said:

Nice hunt. Buttons were irrelevant to a lot of detectorists in my area back in the day. They used to toss them back in the hole when they found them. They were only after Large cents and silver! I had a good friend who (once enlightened 😄), remembers throwing away a GW button before he knew what they were. I love buttons, since I dig any non ferrous and have found many good items because of previous people leaving them. That place looks like a great spot, especially if you can find the 1600's sweet spot. Good luck there.

Thanks! I mis-posted the size of the place and corrected it. It's 490 acres, some of that woods. Because this peninsula is a mid-Atlantic jungle, it will come back quickly and the scrub gets impenetrable but for deer trails. More important and a bit risky is the constant erosion. 😬 One wrong step...

I'm sure with some exhaustive scouting I'll come across a spot where gatherings occurred that the cherry pickers didn't discover, as in other farms under my purview. That is the cherry I want to pick!

Almost a third to a half of the farm is covered with winter wheat so much of it will be unexplored until next winter. It's coming up fast now. This farmer will let me dig, but discretion is the better part of valor. 😎

Spanish silver, very old coins like that 1694 Twopence I dug a while back, and buckles of all types are very possible here, but sadly at random. It's as old a place or even older than the farms out in front of my house.

I get a kick out of backmarks especially, the buttons that have "London" and "Gilt Colour" are especially old.

[CPT_GhostLight]

Another awesome hunt, F350, and congrats on that silver button, that's amazing! I have a new respect for buttons since reading your posts. When I first got to relic hunt, I wasn't impressed with buttons, but now I have a new appreciation for them and have found some older ones relative to the history of the relic sites I hunt. One day I may get back east to hunt for some really old ones. Well done again!

[nebulanoodle]

Very rad! Thanks for sharing.

[GB_Amateur]

16 hours ago, F350Platinum said:

...two really old buttons with no backmarks,...

Are you sure there isn't a backmark on the left of those two?  The photo appears to have some kind of manufacture detail.

Regarding the silver button, do you know if these were actually manufactured for that purpose?  I wondered if yours could have originally been a coin, although it appears convex so it would have taken more than just soldering on the loop to get to its current condition.

7 hours ago, F350Platinum said:

Neptune was on the horizon but polluted out by the sun going down.

Worse than that, it's not visible to the naked eye anywhere on the earth's suface, no matter how dark the sky.  Even Uranus which is considerably closer (and about the same diameter) is extremely difficult to see with naked eye under perfect conditions (and needless to say perfect eyesight).  Even Uranus wasn't 'officially' discovered without a telescope although archeoastronomers later researched early notes of middle ages' observers and found that it was in fact seen, but not recognized as a planet by a couple of them.

Mercury is about the toughest planet for most of us to be able to see with naked eye due to it always being in the twilight.

[F350Platinum]

1 hour ago, CPT_GhostLight said:

Another awesome hunt, F350, and congrats on that silver button, that's amazing! I have a new respect for buttons since reading your posts. When I first got to relic hunt, I wasn't impressed with buttons, but now I have a new appreciation for them and have found some older ones relative to the history of the relic sites I hunt. One day I may get back east to hunt for some really old ones. Well done again!

Thanks!

I probably have hundreds of them now, but never tire of digging them. 🙂 I found a super small one once with fancy decoration, and sadly lost it. 

What I really hope to find are "staff tags". Anything that identifies the previous owners of the place. Those I will probably turn over to the current owner, would have given him the silver button if there was a name on it.

A GW button wouldn't hurt... 🤔 I'm really glad my silver count has gone up this year.

[F350Platinum]

4 minutes ago, GB_Amateur said:

Are you sure there isn't a backmark on the left of those two?

Ha, at first I didn't see any but left it that way as a clever trap to see who would notice 🤣 I can make out the word "colour" on it. You win! 🏆 Thanks for playing. 🙂

6 minutes ago, GB_Amateur said:

Worse than that, it's not visible to the naked eye anywhere on the earth's suface, no matter how dark the sky. 

That I did not know. 👍 I have some cameras I could use for astrophotography, and the right lenses, but I'm too lazy to do it, and it's usually too damn cold to get out there this time of the year when the sky is clearest. The Milky Way is visible many times here, no light pollution.

[GB_Amateur]

7 minutes ago, F350Platinum said:

The Milky Way is visible many times here, no light pollution.

Being able to see the Milky Way is a good sign you have a relatively dark sky, but....

(Hope I'm not veering too far off this site's intention.  In my defense, I will say that many of us go camping in our detecting activities so looking up at the night sky is an additional enjoyable option.  😁)

If you want to find 'dark' and/or compare to your local conditions, here's a really cool site that lets you zoom in on anywhere(?) on earth.

[F350Platinum]

1 hour ago, GB_Amateur said:

Being able to see the Milky Way is a good sign you have a relatively dark sky, but....

(Hope I'm not veering too far off this site's intention.  In my defense, I will say that many of us go camping in our detecting activities so looking up at the night sky is an additional enjoyable option.  😁)

If you want to find 'dark' and/or compare to your local conditions, here's a really cool site that lets you zoom in on anywhere(?) on earth.

Excellent site! I'm in the green. The most amusing fact is most of the light pollution comes from a local penitentiary. 🤣

Haha, I'm always thinking about detecting, so the thoughts of what detecting/prospecting opportunities exist on other celestial bodies are as much of a certainty as some of the properties I pass driving around. 🤪

It would definitely be more difficult to get a Manticore on the moon. 😁