For New Year’s Eve, I wanted to choose something which reflected some special part of 2012.  I also liked the idea of something astronomy-oriented, since we are, after all, celebrating another orbit of the Earth around the Sun.  The landing and footage from NASA’s Curiosity Rover on Mars seemed to fit the bill on a historic and astronomic level, and of course the obvious music to match with this is Mars from Holst’s Planets.

Sadly, nobody has quite got to this combination yet, and making a video of this sort is not really within my skill-set, not to mention the fact that there would undoubtedly be copyright issues associated with combining images and music, neither of which I own!  So for today, I’m including two videos for your wonderment and delight (because really, science is amazing stuff).  The first is a clip of Holst’s Mars, accompanied by a computer simulation of Curiosity’s launch and journey.  The second is a video of Curiosity’s landing on Mars on August 6th, 2012.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zZWOGcdC_PI&w=420&h=315][youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fJgeoHBQpFQ&w=560&h=315]

Happy New Year!  May 2013 bring you more wonders, more music, and more amazing science.  Because we can never have too much amazing science.

(and if you want more images of Mars, checkout NASA’s website here… not to mention this illuminating footage from the Curiosity probe just after landing…)