• Yearbook photo posted online.

The internet was abuzz today after the shooting of U.S. Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ). The shooter, identified as Jared Lee Loughner, was apprehended at the scene. Here is a photograph posted by a classmate of Loughner's from Mountain View High School in Tucson on the SomethingAwful.com forums.

• Jim Nintzel

Well, it's cold outside, but I'm still waiting to get buried under all that snow that's supposed to be headed our way. In the meantime, here's a snowy pic I took up in Flagstaff last week as a family of deer trotted across the Hard Ranch's corral.

Happy New Year, everyone!

• NASA/JPL/University of Arizona

I sure do love the photos of Mars taken by the UA's HiRISE camera. Here's a final shot of a crater in light-toned layered bedrock south of Oyama Crater.

You can find more HiRISE photos here. And if you really dig them, you can order a 2011 HiRISE calender here.

HiRISE team member Livio L. Tornabene tells us about how the above image was created:

Who wants color? My preferred HiRISE color product uses all three color bands (i.e, wavelengths) that HiRISE can image — IRB, which refers to Infrared-Red-Blue/Green. Ever heard of R-G-B (Red-Blue-Green)? These three primary colors essentially combine to make all the perceived colors that we know of.

By substituting a wavelength that is normally invisible to the human eye for one that is, like infrared for red, we are able to create a "false"-color image. The infrared is useful because its sensitive to iron-bearing minerals and their oxidation state (degree of "rusting"). Ferrous iron, the more oxidized variety, is what makes Mars so reddish. Basically, most of the materials on Mars are pretty oxidized/rusted, and therefore altered from the more original ferric iron state (the less oxidized iron common to volcanic minerals such as olivine and pyroxene). So in general, the bluer the materials in our IRB images the less

Wilco (The Dog) is in hot pursuit of a mysterious sleigh.

Season's Greetings from Flagstaff!