Eyes Full Of Stars

As with the return of the swallows to Capistrano, the evening bat flight at Carlsbad Caverns, and the regularity of the moon’s phases another predictable and recurrent event has permeated the realm of cyberspace. Perhaps you have seen it. It is the annual ‘Mars hoax’ email.

While the email content has several variations, all have a common origin. Following the historic Mars opposition during August 2003 when the red planet came to within 35 million miles of Earth, a chronicle of the event was created and re-packaged with no date. First circulated in the summer of 2004, the oft-titled “Mars Spectacular” email makes several extravagant and inaccurate claims.

Mars comes to opposition with Earth every 26 months or so when both planets reach the same side of their orbits around the sun. That makes it impossible for Mars to be at opposition every year on August 27^th. Another factoid states that Mars will appear as large as the full moon. Whoa, let’s get a grip here. The moon’s average distance is around 238,000 miles. The average distance between Earth and Mars is 140 million miles. The only way for Mars to appear the same size as a full moon would be if it was positioned just 500,000 miles away from Earth. I would love to see it that large, but unless I can hitch a ride on the next Mars probe, I am content to wait for a view through my telescope during the next opposition in late January 2010.

The “Mars Spectacular” email has been forwarded to me from many parts of the world including well-meaning friends and family. Over the years, it has morphed from a simple piece of misinformation into a full-fledged viral campaign complete with a flash-animated version that could be straight out of Universal Studios.

The world wide web is something of a double-edged sword. On one hand, we have easy access to late-breaking stories like the recent scarring of Jupiter’s southern hemisphere by a probable comet impact or the sun’s record-breaking string of days without sunspots. But, the internet is also loaded with dubious sites hosting stories about the Large Hadron Collider spawning Earth-hungry black holes or the end of the world come December 2012.

In July, NASA released images of Apollo landing sites snapped by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. Now, I may be too optimistic to expect that pictures of lunar descent modules, scientific instruments and astronaut footprint trails will quiet those who believe the landings were staged on a Hollywood back lot. But, even though there is good fun to be had, I am hopeful that eventually we will get back on track regarding scientific fact versus fiction.

On August 27th, don’t bother going out to look for Mars, your time will be better spent doing just about anything else. Early risers can view Mars in the pre-dawn sky high above and to the upper right of Venus. It will appear as a small bright point of light with a ruddy color similar to the stars Aldebaran or Betelgeuse.

Maybe one day the “Mars Spectacular” email will live up to its promise that “no one alive today will ever see this again” and fade into obscurity. But for now, I’m not going to hold my breath.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 26th, 2009 at 7:05 pm and is filed under Pop Astronomy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.