Personally, I find it somewhat of a downer that these photons originated in a star mumbledy-mumbledy brazillion miles away, flew through the uncharted depths of space past wonders unknown by human minds, avoided vast interstellar dust clouds and other celestial obstructions, and traveled on a path destined to intersect the imaging system of a particular telescope on a particular mountain on the third planet of a rather ordinary, uninteresting star in the spiral arm of one of billions of galaxies…only to be intercepted at the very last possible moment by a wayward floating blob of water vapor a few hundred feet above the telescope.

The final result of their mumbledy-mumbledy brazillion mile tour of the universe was not, unfortunately, to be detected by advanced equipment, analyzed by up-and-coming scientists, and hopefully used to allow said scientists to better understand the universe. Rather, the result was that a particular blob of floating water vapor was heated by some infinitesimal fraction of a degree while the scientists below shake their fists and curse the clouds.

Truly, a rather pedestrian end to a photon that has traveled so far.

Alas, mother nature decided this was not going to work, and gave us clouds and lightning. As such, we didn’t get to start observing at all and are now off the mountain.

In other news, the observatory is pretty nifty. I’ve never been at this one before.

Talk about a long shot: the Phoenix lander was all bundled up for the descent, and was less than two meters in diameter. To get the picture, the MRO had to rotate 62 degrees off-down-axis and take the picture from a highly inclined angle. My back-of-the-envelope calculations show that the MRO was about 602km (~375 miles) away from Phoenix when it took the photograph. That’s some impressive photography.

This is the first time in history that a spacecraft has photographed another spacecraft landing on Mars.

I seem to have recovered somewhat from the excess champagne consumed yesterday. All of us here at the UofA are still quite giddy about it. Regular posting will resume shortly.

If anyone in the Tucson area wants to stop by, say hello, and (hopefully!) celebrate the landing, feel free to drop me an email and we can meet up.