• Jim Nintzel

I'm not sure what to tell you about this photo I snapped yesterday, other than the French paleontologist makes it tangentially related to the Gem and Mineral Show and it's part of an upcoming feature story.

ETA: My apologies for not mentioning this sooner, but the mastermind behind the shot was Eric Kroll, a photographer of some renown. TW will have a profile of Kroll in an upcoming issue. As Eric notes below, the violinist is Robert Villa and the woman doing the handstand is Katelynn Charron of Boston, who is visiting Tucson to assist the fossil man, Serge Jnoun.

You can read more about the shoot at Eric's blog, including the tidbit that the shoot came to a premature end when we got busted by The Man.

• Jim Nintzel

The Arizona Wildcats suffered their third loss of the season in a defeat to the California Golden Bears, 77-69, last night. It was a tough week for Top 10 teams: Five of the top seven in the AP rankings lost a game.

Next up: The Cats go on the road to face Colorado and Utah.

From Airman magazine: Director Andrew Breese took time-lapse footage of the storage area of the 309th Aerospace Maintenance and Regeneration Group, often called the "Boneyard" around here. Beautiful pictures of decaying planes! Why not?

• NASA/JPL/University of Arizona
• Curiosity is making its way across Mars

The team behind the UA's HiRISE camera aboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter released an astonishing image that captures the tire tracks of the Curiosity rover that's tooling across Gale Crater. HiRISE Principal Investigator Alfred McEwen notes:

This image was acquired for color coverage of the region that the Curiosity rover may explore, but we acquired some extra RED (monochromatic) coverage of the rover tracks.

This image shows the entire distance traveled from the landing site (dark smudge at left) to its location as of 2 January 2013 (the rover is bright feature at right). The tracks are not seen where the rover has recently driven over the lighter-toned surface, which may be more indurated than the darker soil.

You can find out more about what Curiosity is up to here. Spoiler warning: The little robot is set to start using its laser to drill into some Mars rock.

BTW, what was with Danehy's weird aside about the space program in this week's issue? I wasn't happy to hear we were retiring the space shuttles (and I'd be happy to see NASA's budget increased), but the Curiosity mission is just one example of a healthy space program. Right here in Tucson, not that long ago, we put a different robot on the Arctic plains of Mars. The UA is working on the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft, which is going to grab a sample off an asteroid in a few years. And UA scientists are part of the team that's working on the James Webb Space Telescope, which will be replacing the Hubble in a few years. If that's not enough to inspire America to "again become a nation of people who dream and strive and reach," what is? (Given the scientific advances we make in this country, I don't think we've ever lost our ability to dream and strive and reach, although it'd be nice if more kids were interested in science, engineering and math.)

And Tom, please don't tell me that robot space exploration doesn't count. Given that you don't have qualms about robotic law enforcement, it would just be chauvinistic if you're anti-robot when it comes to outer space.

Hey, remember Jesse Kelly? The guy who was beaten soundly by both Gabby Giffords and Ron Barber, then bounced out of town to work with Citizens United, the widely-reviled political action committee, infamous for being part of a Supreme Court decision that many feel has warped American democracy as we know it?

After months of stop-and-go Tweeting, Kelly appears to have picked up the habit for good this time, treating followers to his brilliant football commentary, as well as right-leaning retweets.

I'm generally happy to ignore Kellly's pearls of wisdom, but this one stopped me in my tracks this morning:

• From the fountain of wit that is twitter.com/jessekellyDC

Two points here: For one, according to the story Kelly linked to, Obama plans to have children who wrote to him after the Newtown shooting with him on stage when he announces his gun proposals. Yeah, it's emotional pandering, but without the shooting at Sandy Hook, we wouldn't be having this discussion. Obnoxious, but understandable.

For another, Kelly did this:

Honestly, that repetition of talking points couldn't be any more robotic. You're selling out your own kind, Kelly!

• Jim Nintzel

The largest disco ball in North American history was under construction this afternoon at Hotel Congress in advance of the big Studio 54 New Year's Eve party tonight.

That sounds like fun, as do the big downtown dance parties at the Rialto Theatre and Playground; Paula Poundstone's set at the Fox Theatre; and the Loft Cinema's screening of The Poseidon Adventure, which is timed to start so that everyone in the theater can celebrate the new year at the same time as the doomed passengers aboard the ship do.

You can find the Weekly's roundup of New Year's Eve stuff right here.

• Adam Block/Mount Lemmon SkyCenter/University of Arizona

Slate's Phil Plait rounds up 21 stunning photos of the universe from 2012. The UA's space team has a connection to several of them, including the above image taken atop Mount Lemmon:

For sheer beauty, there is little in the sky to match a magnificent open-armed spiral galaxy. This is NGC 5033, which is located 50 million light years away from Earth. That’s relatively close by cosmic standards, allowing us to get a good peek at it even though we see it at a low angle. Accomplished astronomer Adam Block took this image using the 0.8-meter Schulman Telescope on Mount Lemmon in Arizona, and it’s a total exposure of 13 hours. You can see the combined glow of billions of older, redder stars in the center, and the blue light from younger stars being born in the arms—the pink blobs festooned on the arms are gigantic nebulae, clouds of gas and dust, where stars are being born and lit from within by those stars. The oddly distorted shape to the arms (together with some other unusual features) makes me think NGC 5033 recently had a close encounter with another galaxy, its gravity warping the shape of the spiral. That’s actually pretty common in the life of big galaxies like this. It’s a dangerous Universe out there.

Others include the image of the earliest galaxies yet glimpsed by man (which I wrote about this week in TW's print edition) and the astounding dust devil on Mars that we featured on The Range back in March.

All 21 photos are magnificent. Go check them out right now.

• Daily Dish

Andrew Sullivan has a weekly "View From Your Window" contest wherein his readers guess the location of photos from exotic spots across the globe. This week's landscape: Sierra Vista Municipal-Libby AAF Airport, Sierra Vista, Arizona. The guesses from readers range from Mongolia to Area 51.