Oh no, not again!

Every two years, like clockwork, the same dumb email starts to circulate the internet: Mars will be as big as the Moon! Somehow, that headline grabs the attention of thousands around the planet and entices them to forward it to all of their friends. I keep imagining some evil grinning teenager in a backroom somewhere, thinking "hey the prank worked... AGAIN".

As you already guessed from the tone of the first paragraph, it is indeed not true. Mars will NOT be a large as the Moon, and will never be. It cannot be, because Mars will always be way too far. The email in question is called the Mars Hoax, and has been around for about four or five years now, and it surfaces every two years when Mars is nearing opposition.

The history of the hoax is in my opinion truly a simple typo: one line break too much. The mistake is still there in the current version(s) of the email:

Mars will be as large as the Moon...
With a magnification of 200x

If these two sentences are read as one, they are true and make sense. With a telescope that magnifies 200 times, Mars will can indeed about as large as the Moon. And at 300 times, it will be much bigger then the Moon. Well, duh...

So, please PLEASE do not forward the email and perpetuate this dumb thing. If you are unsure about an email, you can always check snopes.com and check the status of the myth and whether it is true or not. In this case you can read all about the Mars Hoax, and you can see that I have been attempting to debunk this myth for years and years.

What IS true however, is that we have a great chance to see a meteor shower the coming nights! Every august the Earth travels through a part of space where a comet named "Swift-Tuttle" has left behind debris. This debris will burn up in the upper atmosphere and can create a spectacular show of shooting stars. Tomorrow night it should peak where it should be possible to see several dozen per hour. They all seem to come out of the same part of the sky: the constellation of Perseus, hence the name of the shower: The Perseus Meteor Shower.

Observing meteors is very easy. Just lay down a blanket in your yard where you are able to see a goos part of the sky, and look up. The best time for meteor watching is always around 3 in the morning, but this is not to say that it is possible to have some great shooting stars before midnight.

And when you see a shooting star, please wish for a planetarium.