I am so thoroughly accustomed to thinking of light requiring time to
travel from the point of origin to my eye that it seems silly that this
could be a problem for anyone. When I watched the TV coverage of
the Mars Phoenix lander as it landed on Mars, I knew that the events
being being described by the people at JPL had already happened
25 minutes earlier. When I see light from the Sombrero Galaxy in a
telescope, I know the light was emitted more than 50 million years
ago, so what I see is the way it looked 50 million years ago.

What I don't remember is when I first learned about this time delay.
Probably before I was ten years old, but possibly as early as four or
five, when I may have learned that there would be a time delay
communicating between Earth and astronauts on the Moon or Mars,
if that was mentioned in Disney's Space movies made in the 1950s
with the help of Werner von Braun.

-- Jeff, in Minneapolis

__________________
http://www.FreeMars.org/jeff/

"I find astronomy very interesting, but I wouldn't if I thought we
were just going to sit here and look." -- "Van Rijn"

"The other planets? Well, they just happen to be there, but the
point of rockets is to explore them!" -- Kai Yeves