3494 Purple Mountain is a small main belt asteroid. It is not purple; its unusual name comes from the Purple Mountain Observatory in China, where it was rediscovered in 1980. (It had been seen but lost several times since 1962. See lost asteroids.)
Purple Mountain is a vestoid, a fragment blasted off the giant asteroid 4 Vesta by the impact that formed the Vestian collisional family. A spectroscopic analysis showed it to have a composition very similar to the cumulate eucrite meteorites.
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Famous quotes containing the words purple mountain, purple and/or mountain:
“O beautiful for spacious skies,
For amber waves of grain,
For purple mountain majesties
Above the fruited plain!”
—Katharine Lee Bates (1859–1929)
“Ah splendour, my goddess turns:
or was it the sudden heat,
beneath quivering of molten flesh,
of veins, purple as violets?”
—Hilda Doolittle (1886–1961)
“Come live with me and be my Love,
And we will all the pleasures prove
That hills and valleys, dales and fields,
Or woods or steepy mountain yields.
And we will sit upon the rocks,
And see the shepherds feed their flocks
By shallow rivers, to whose falls
Melodious birds sing madrigals.”
—Christopher Marlowe (1564–1593)