August 27th, special Astronomical Event - "two moons"

[Copernicus]

Two moons on 27th August 2010

Planet Mars will be the brightest in the night sky starting in August. It will look as large as the full moon to the naked eye.

This will cultivate on Aug. 27 when Mars comes within 34.65M miles of earth.

Be sure to watch the sky on Aug. 27 12:30 am. It will look like the earth has 2 moons.

The next time Mars may come this close is in 2287.



Share this with your friends as NO ONE ALIVE TODAY

will ever see it again.

[Canis]

Yo, Cop.....That shit is OLD. It happened 5 or 6 years ago. But the email just won't die. Comes around every year since then.

[Stormcrow]

Origins: Some things never go out of style, and this "Mars Spectacular" message is one of them. It's yet another example of a widely-circulated e-mail containing information that was once true but which continues to be forwarded around year after year, long after the information it contains has become outdated.

Mars did make an extraordinarily close approach to Earth several years ago, culminating on 27 August 2003, when the red planet came within 35 million miles (or 56 million kilometers) of Earth, its nearest approach to us in almost 60,000 years. At that time, Mars appeared approximately 6 times larger and 85 times brighter in the sky than it ordinarily does. (The earlier message quoted above was often reproduced with an unfortunate line break in the middle of the third sentence of the second paragraph, leaving some readers with the mistaken impression that Mars would "look as large as the full moon to the naked eye" without realizing that the statement only applied to those viewing Mars through a telescope with 75-power magnification.)

Although Mars' proximity to Earth in August 2003 (referred to as a
perihelic opposition) was a rare occurrence, the red planet comes almost as near to us every 15 to 17 years. To the unaided observer, Mars' appearance in August 2003 wasn't significantly larger or brighter than it is during those much more common intervals of closeness.

Mars had another close encounter with Earth in in 2005, but that occurrence took place in October (not August), and the red planet appeared about 20% smaller than it did during similar circumstances in 2003. Mars also made a close approach to Earth in December 2007, but even then it was still about 55 million miles away from us, not nearly as close as it was in 2003 or 2005. Not until 2018 will our view of Mars be similar to the one that was available in 2003, and it won't be until the year 2287 that Mars will come closer to Earth than it did back in 2003.

As Texas astronomer Torvald Hessel observed in a 2006 interview about the perennial "Mars Spectacular" message:



Q: What's the truth?
A: Mars gets close to Earth every two years. So, last year, Mars was very close. Three years ago, it was spectacularly close ... And right now, I'm sad to say, Mars is actually behind the Sun; we can't see it at all.
Q: How wide spread is this falsehood?
A: People get excited about it, start to send e-mail ... and every August we see this e-mail coming back and I get a lot of e-mails about it, of course.


The web site of the Students for the Exploration and Development of Space (SEDS) provides a chart displaying data about Mars Oppositions (past, present, and future), and the web site of the Hubble Heritage Project offers some nice composite telescope images from previous Mars near oppositions.

[CULPRITE_INC]

i got this email three weeks ago, did a little research about it and marked it spam

[Buschman]

So are you saying that this email I just got from Kashmi Ramar saying that if I give him my personal info,..he will release $100 million dollars to me that has been kept in my name, from a dead relative on my mother's cousins side,..twice removed,..is bogus?

Damn,..I thought I was rich!

[Stormcrow]

So are you saying that this email I just got from Kashmi Ramar saying that if I give him my personal info,..he will release $100 million dollars to me that has been kept in my name, from a dead relative on my mother's cousins side,..twice removed,..is bogus?

Damn,..I thought I was rich!

No no! That email sounds valid. I say "Go for it!" What have you got to lose?

[Buschman]

Ok,..I don't see anything on Snopes,..I'm there dude!

[Stormcrow]

Silly boy!

[Copernicus]

Awww, geeez, sorry people... I should have known, it was in an email from my mom, LOL

[LEFT]

bummeoutman

[Canis]

Look on the bright side, Cop......You'll get to see it again in 2287.

[Stormcrow]

No, you'll be able to see it next year. It happens every two years.

[Canis]

Shhhhh......Make him wait for it.

[rc2james]

Oh well. That was way past my bed time anyway.:coffee:

[StoneTheCrow]

LoL Gotta love old emails.