Have you gotten a copy of the email yet? If you haven't, you probably will. Forwarded from a friend, forwarded again and again until the original source is lost in the murky cloud of the Internet, it encourages you to get set for the experience of a lifetime. When MARS WILL LOOK AS LARGE AS THE FULL MOON!!!!! Is this going to happen? No. But there's a strange gem of truth at the heart of this misunderstanding/hoax. I'll give you the history and then everything you need to explain what's going on to your excited but misinformed email forwarding friends.

Read the full blog entry

Should we have one of these notices in every forum? I think we've got most of them covered already.

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Everything I need to know I learned through Googling.

my dad sent me this one last year and i had to tell him the bad news that it was BS.

has anyone seen the picture supposedly taken from the north pole looking south? you'd remeber this one if you had seen it. there is a picture of HUGE full moon with mountain ranges in the forground. mountain ranges at the north pole? yeah .. ok...

Debunked here: North Pole photo

Details at Snopes.

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hilarious! such feeble fakery.

There's really only two directions you can look at the North Pole: south and up.

Besides, THIS time around, Mars is almost as far away from us as it can get -- it's almost exactly on the other side of the Sun right now.

Since we catch up to Mars every other year (just about), the odd years are when we're farthest from it. Since we were close in 2003, we were far in 2004, and that makes us far again in 2006.

Let's see...

240,000 x 4.167 approx. = 1 million and 34.5 million miles is the closest approach of Mars to Earth. And, 34.5 x 4.17 = 143.865. That means the closest approach mentioned in the article that Mars got to Earth is at least 144 times farther away than the Moon.

Not very close to the "90 times" as indicated in the article.

So, that begs the question, where did the writer learn math?

Regards,
InterPur

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If chess is just a game, then music is just noise.

Well, the computation was pretty good, dividing the 2003 Mars-Earth distance in miles by the rough Moon-Earth distance in km:

(34 646 418 miles) / (385 000 km) = 89.9906961 miles / km

But, the units leave a little to be desired.

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You're quite right. Here is a graphic that shows the positions of the Earth and Mars on August 27, 2006. You can see that Earth and Mars are pretty much on opposite sides of the Sun. On that date Mars will be about 240 million miles from Earth.

Mars' next closest approach to Earth is December 24, 2007. On that date Mars will be about 55 million miles from Earth.

Quite a difference!

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"A mystic is a person who is puzzled before the obvious but who understands the nonexistent." -- Elbert Hubbard

Oops, bad math. Thanks for catching that.

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Fraser Cain
Publisher
Universe Today - Free space news delivered by email every weekday.

Darn, I've been looking forward to it

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Forming opinions as we speak

Who forwarded that email? People who didn't read it?
"At a modest 75-power magnification Mars will look as large as the full moon to the naked eye."
To me there's no misunderstanding possible.

I didn't get the e-mail, but if it's completely fake then what WILL we see on August 27th? If Mars doesn't appear as big as the moon, then what will it look like?

Ed, did you actually receive a copy of this chain email?

The version that I received didn't look like your quote. Instead, it had an oversized paragraph break between the word "magnification" and the word "Mars," so that the phrase "Mars will look as large as the full moon to the naked eye" stood by itself as the first sentence in a paragraph. That phrase/sentence was also enlarged to headline size, and displayed in a contrasting color. So the email was plenty deceptive, and the deception was obviously intentional.

Here's a copy of the actual chain email that I received:
http://www.burtonsys.com/marshoax.html

Except for the colors, it looked similar to this:See what I mean?

-Dave
dave421 at burtonsys dot com but please no spam

By August 27 Mars sets a little after sunset, so it's going to be very difficult to see at all. In any event, without a telescope Mars looks like a reddish point of light even at its closest approach.

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"A mystic is a person who is puzzled before the obvious but who understands the nonexistent." -- Elbert Hubbard

This is STILL floating around? WOW! Just wow.

Gawd.....
I already saw one of those in my astro club emails.

I saw a martian yesterday. He was as big as the moon, at a modest 210 magnification.

yawn

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There we were in the park when suddenly some old lady says I stole her purse..... I chucked the professor at her but she kept coming..... So I had to hit her with this purse I found.
-- Bender

Might as well bump this thread, the title fits.

It's already on snopes for Aug 2009.

Mars Spectacular

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Numbers are not case sensitive. (me)

I had hoped this had died after not seeing a single email about it last year.

How many people are getting this yet again....

altho there is a new twist, I've now got it from 3 people as a Powerpoint presentation
(I will admit its probably the first time many people have actually seen what Mars looks like, two of my friends had never seen a picture of Mars except as a `star'- 1 actually thought it was a star (sigh)

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No, I'm being ordinarily sarcastic. Don't make me get very sarcastic. You wouldn't like me when I'm very sarcastic. - JayUtah



Surely if you are going to start a conspiracy theory it is best to start with something that might have a grain of truth or reality in it. To start with the preposterous and go downhill from there is just stupid. steve(primus) (Avatar)

A lot of people have been asking about this on Yahoo Answers lately. One person even tried to blame Mars getting closer to Earth for the recent typhoon that hit China. I wonder if the phrase "not even wrong" applies here.

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"One does not require alien ruins in order to absorb a profound sense of wonder and mystery from the moon. That our civilization had actually visited it is miracle enough." Jason Roberts

What a pity that the original email didn't mention the year.

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Forming opinions as we speak

I sent out the original email, and it included the date. AND it included a telescope. Obviously, some of my respondents didn't think they were important.

Don't forget, even in the year that this was appropriate, the mangled email still caused the same buzz.

Awhile back, I was wondering whether this might be true from the Martian point of view. Of course, if a Martain said "I wonder if the Earth at opposition will look as big as a full moon," the proper response would be: "Which moon?"

If I did the math correctly, Earth (radius 6,378.1 km) as seen from Mars under a close opposition (55 million km distant) would appear about 0.8 minutes in width.

The smaller, farther Martian moon, Deimos, is supposed to be 15 km on its longest diameter, and 23,460 km distant. I get 2.2 minutes of apparent width.

It would have been fun had that worked out, but, no, Earth doesn't quite make it. But under just 3X magnification, Earth would look as big as their smaller moon.

(Actually, both Earth and Deimos would be pretty close to starlike points, so one might not notice the difference.)

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Later . . .