Astroprof’s Page

Mars still isn’t going to be spectacular this month.

Published on Aug 6, 2006 at 2:28 pm. 1 Comment.
Filed under skywatching.

Wow. I realize that only a few people actually read my site (I would like to work to get more to read the new one here). A while back, I posted a entry about the spectacular Mars urban myth going around. Well, it seems to have really taken off this year! This past week, someone forwarded me a really snazzy Powerpoint presentation about how Mars was going to be the closest to Earth in 60,000 years, and how it was going to appear as big as the full moon in the sky (it even showed the two side by side in the presentation. Well, it just isn’t going to happen. As I said before, Mars will be nowhere near Earth this August. And, even it were nearby, it would not appear to be remotely as big as the Moon with the naked eye. So, if you hear about this urban myth, don’t pass it on. What got me about this one, though, was that someone had gone to all the trouble to make such a snazzy powerpoint presentation. They even put the date listed as “August 27, 2006″. The original email going around for the last three years simply said “this coming August 27″ with no date. That is why I can understand at least a little bit why it keeps going. But someone went to the trouble of adding the year to this thing, but didn’t check to see if the information was accurate. That is what gets me. They put all this work into this presentation, which was really good artistically, by the way, but they didn’t bother to even do a little bit of checking to see if it were true. Interesting. It reminds me of how my students write their term papers. They do a quick Google or Yahoo search, take the first thing that looks good, and base their whole term paper off of that, without even a cursory check to see if it makes any sense at all.

So, it goes, I guess.

-Astroprof