Stardust landing

For those who didn't know, NASA's "Stardust" probe was going to cut through Earth's atmosphere early Sunday morning of 1-15-06 and land somewhere in the Utah desert. Naturally, that's definitely something to experience.
I met up with a few friends from Orem Jonny, Heidi, Bear, plus about 4 or so of their friends. Bryan, Trevor, Brandy, and her younger brother also came along. We headed out on HW 80 around 11 something o'clock, and it began to rain slushy stuff. As we passed the Airport it got really bad, and I began to get worried that it would continue like that for the night. After we went past Salt Lake, the weather began to look better, and it stopped raining. Out West, the skies looked like thinning partly cloudy cells. We took exit 56, saw two frozen dead cows by some railroad tracks, and headed on a dirt road that was covered in snow. Our caravan of 3 cars slid around the fun desert road just outside of the salt flats. (I had planned on going all the way out to Nevada, but other party members were understandably unenthusiastic about such a drive.) I popped the rental car's trunk to expose a hefty load of broken wood pallets from Trevor's work, and we started a fire.... on the road. We set up the lawn chairs, broke out the Mt. Dew, and S'mores. The fire wasn't too large, since we had some time to wait, and we only had so many wood pallets. We stood around the fire, cooking marshmallows, and occasionally firing off a few rounds of ammunition for our amusement.
The clouds moved around, and were thinning, but the cloud cover still hid the stars. The full moon illuminated the scattered snow covered clumps of sage brush.

Heidi had stated that the probe had been bumped up to a re-entry
time of 2:30 am, so we waited for a while, but saw and heard nothing. I felt confident that the NASA site had a better approximation of 2:57 am, so I was waiting for that time. Then, just like clockwork, right at 2:57AM Brandy spotted a light behind the clouds. I hit my camcorder (LOW LOW battery) and watched the cool bright object glow behind the clouds. I thought it was pretty cool, but I can't say the same for others in the group. Didn't hear the sonic boom, but I figured we were too far east to hear the boom anyways. We burnt the rest of the wood, and headed back to our place.
All in all, it was pretty cool. I would have liked to have gone out to Nevada to see it streak across the horizon, but the outing was still worth it.

So-so video of Stardust making its entry behind the clouds
Cat on the dashboard