No ‘two moons’ Friday night

Andrew Fazekas

An email promising sky-watchers a view of ‘two moons’ on August 27 has astronomers seeing red, as scientists try to counter a seemingly unending Mars hoax.

The anonymous message from an unknown part of the globe says that the red planet “ … will look as large as the full moon” in the night sky, and that “no one alive today will ever see this again.”

The claim has been bombarding people’s inboxes worldwide every summer for years. Today the Mars hoax has grown into a kind of cyber legend - one that astronomers are still struggling to debunk.

“The possibility of seeing Mars as large as the moon strikes the imagination,” staff astronomer at the Montréal Planetarium in Quebec Marc Jobin said. “The sad reality is that a lot of people have little comprehension of astronomy and are unable to call the hoax.”

Thread of truth

In fact, there is a thread of truth that inspired the email several years ago.

Planets are not on perfectly circular orbits, and during their elliptical paths around the sun, planets can vary in their exact distances to each other over time.

National Geographic News