Here are a few pics of one last Ridge crystal for 2014.
This tabby is a little over 2" tip to tip.
I'm sure once you get done looking at these pics
you'll be thinking the same thing as me.

To boldly post what no man has posted before.  Very cool.  It does resemble some type of space shuttle.  I feel bad now taking it home.  Maybe a New Years gift.   

I've already taken pictures of this specimen starting on page 2 of this thread, however, I've had a camera upgrade  since then and I've gained a little more experience with lighting so I wanted to re-take them.

My theory is that the ilmenite is attracted to the quartz or vice versa.  In either case there seems to be an affinity between the two.  This you can glean from the set of photographs of this quartz and ilmenite specimen.  If you pay close attention where the quartz crystals gather, they seem collect around the darker more ilmenite rich areas.  Alternatively, the ilmenite was drawn to the quartz crystals.  It's almost like ink to water drops.  It appears as though the quartz absorbed the ilmenite into its structure.  Notice how many of the quartz crystals are darker than the surrounding quartz matrix.  Some quartz crystals are so heavily included that their crystalline structures were affected.  They had become very distorted and blobs in some cases.  Perhaps ilmenite lowers the melting point of quartz.

The quartz crystals embedded around the "book" of ilmenite in the fourth pic look like diamonds.
A synchronized development between the ilmenite(titanium) and quartz is not too hard to imagine.
How would that compare to the same interlocking growth with mica?

Here are two angles of another little chlorite phantom from late 2014.

Props on much improved photography skills there Joe!  Excellent!

Well thanks. New camra: Nikon Cool Pix. Love it.
But it was the Tabby in Space shot that took over an hour!

I found that if you take the pieces in the first two pics
you come up with the piece in the third pic.