posted August 16, 2005 09:13 AM            

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The circulating message about this Mars phenoema is another example of an item that was once true but is now being circulated again, long after the events it describes have come to pass. This article was relevant back in 2003, but it is not applicable now, two years later.

Mars did make an extraordinarily close approach to Earth which culminated 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 does ordinarily. (The message was often reproduced with an unfortunate line break in the middle of the second 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" and not realizing that the statement only applied to those using viewing Mars through a scope 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 will have another close encounter with Earth in in 2005, but that occurrence will take place in October (not August), and the red planet will appear about 20% smaller than it did during similar circumstances in 2003.

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