Will a Double Moon Really Rise in the Night Sky tonight at 12:30am?
August 27 at 00:30 Lift up your eyes and look up at the night sky. On this night, the planet Mars will pass just 34.65 million miles from the earth. To the naked eye it looks like two of the moon above the ground!
The next time Mars will be so close to the Earth as much as in 2287. Share the news with your friends, because no one living on this earth has ever seen!
Can it really be true? Mars passing so close to Earth that it appears the same size as the Moon in the night sky, so they look like two moons rising together?
This story – like the photo above that has gone viral on Facebook – has been floating around social media and email chains before that for more than a decade. It first became popular back in 2003, when Mars passed within 35 million miles of Earth on Aug. 27 of that year, its closest approach to our planet in nearly 60,000 years.
At the time, the red planet appeared six times bigger and 85 times brighter in the night sky than it normally does, but nothing close to the size of the Moon. "To the unaided eye, Mars will look like a bright red star, a pinprick of light, certainly not as wide as the full Moon," NASA notes in its debunking of the hoax.
The misunderstanding that Mars and the Moon would seem to be the same size may have come from a simple typing mistake in one of the many old emails that got passed around the internet in the days before Facebook.
"One version of the message was often reproduced with an unfortunate line break," Snopes.com notes, "leaving some readers with the mistaken impression that Mars would 'look as large as the full moon to the naked eye' without realizing that that statement only applied to those viewing Mars through a telescope with 75-power magnification."
Nevertheless, the story has clearly taken hold in the public's consciousness. A search on Google for "double moon" turns up 136 million results, while the Facebook post above had been shared more than 950,000 times by this writing.
But like Bigfoot or the Abominable Snowman, the evidence (or lack thereof) for what would be a truly spectacular celestial event doesn't seem to get in the way of its being passed around every year. The astronomy-focused blog EarthSky says Google search traffic has skyrocketed recently, making this post the most popular on its site over the past week.
The writers of the site use simple math to explain why even if Mars did appear side-by-side with Earth's moon this year – which it won't – as well as the simple reason that the red planet is so much farther away from Earth than the moon.
"As seen from Earth ... Mars' diameter is about 1/140th of the diameter of the full moon," EarthSky.org explains. "You would have had to line up 140 planet Mars – side by side – to equal the moon's diameter."
So even when it made such an extraordinarily close approach to Earth back in 2003, Mars did not appear anywhere close to the size of the Moon. But will that dissuade the legions of Facebook fans who pass along the stunning image above?
We'll just have to wait and see.
Story source from Weather.com
