soapbox

I got a chain email last week that I really should have forwarded to everyone.  It mentioned that, because Mars and the Earth were going to be close, Mars would look as big as the full moon in the sky.  I didn’t particularly believe it because I know that the Mars-Earth near approach was about 3 years ago.

I figured it wouldn’t hurt anything to take a look though, so I got up at 4am yesterday morning and looked towards the west.  No shit, but there was a huge reddish thing in the sky the size of the full moon.  Since I’m an astronomer, I know that Mars is red and it wasn’t anything near as bright as the moon, so it really did look like Mars was huge and the size of the moon.  It was dim like Mars too.  The only thing I had to think about was if Mars could actually get that close.  Of course, I know that Mars is bigger than the moon, so it doesn’t have to be as close to the Earth as the moon is to look just as big.

I’m going to have to pay more attention to mass emails in the future.  They can show us a lot about astronomy!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 29th, 2007 at 11:41 am and is filed under geek, humor. 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.