Not much of a choice after all.

It was thrilling to watch the culmination of so much work — and the spending of so much money. It was fun to get some sense of the personalities of the NASA employees who normally toil behind the scenes. And the whole event was heightened since it was easy to share the experience, in a sense, with others via social media — Facebook and Twitter.

The live experience was a sharp contrast with my experience of NBC’s Olympics coverage.

I wish I could watch the Olympics live as easily as watching Curiosity land on MARS. #MSL #NBCfail

— Bill Dawers (@billdawers) August 6, 2012

I wasn’t quite sure what I was doing, but I took some screencaps (Command-Shift-4 on the Mac) during the live broadcast. Here are some of them, arranged chronologically. Here’s hoping for lots of interesting news from Curiosity in the months and years ahead.