about the two moons on august 27th hoax e-mail
Tue, 07/10/2007 - 04:12 — shehal
if you're been receiving an e-mail saying something similar to what is stated bellow, note that it is a hoax!!!!!
it is scientific blasphemy!!! there is absolutely no scientific basis in that hoax e-mail (and ppl believe thats it true... read the comments bellow...) i've had friends asking "whats this about two moons being there on the 27th of august"... and i've had numerous fwds... it happened last year as well... and the year before...

anyways... its a hoax... and i've tried to simply my explanation as much as a i can... if you dont get it... feel free to ask and also dig wikipedia...

also... pls feel free to ask any questions or argue...

okay so the hoax e-mail reads something like....

Two moon on 27 August*

*27th Aug the Whole World is waiting for.............*

Planet Mars will be the brightest in the night sky starting 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.


let me rip this piece by piece...

astronomical data... on 27 august 2007
mars is 1.1802 AU from earth (AU - astronomical unit - 1 AU = average distance between earth and sun = about 150 million kilometers)
the moon is 0.0025 AU from earth
the moon is 470 times closer to earth than mars
mars' radius is about 3,400 km
moon's radius is about 1,700 km
so, mars is about twice as big (radius) as the moon
Planet Mars will be the brightest in the night sky starting August.
moon is the brightest object except on new moon... and 27 august is NOT a new moon day.... in fact... its a full moon day... the moon will be very bright... according to the astronomical sky charts the moon has a magnitude of 12.32 and mars has a magnitude of 0.41... the magnitude is expressed as a log10 term... like decibels in sound intensity... so the moon is 2.512(12.24 - 0.42) brighter than mars.... numerically, that is 57,500 times...

how does brightness work?
brightness (light intensity) obeys the inverse square law... that is... a lamp 1 meter away from you would have 4 times the brightness if it was 2 meters away from you...
planets and moons such as mars, the moon, jupiter etc. do not emit light, instead they reflect light (from the sun)...
so think of mars and the moon as giant mirrors... plant will be seen as a disc to an observer (you) on earth... the amount of light reflected would depend on the (projected) area of the object... which means that mars would reflect 4 times the amount of light than the moon... (because area of a circle is proportional to the square of its radius, A=πR2) but the moon is 470 times closer to earth than mars... which means its (470)

so we can dismiss that claim... PFFTTTT!!!!!

next... It will look as large as the full moon to the naked eye.
how big an object appears to the naked eye depends on the angle it creates with the eye, called the vision angle... if one object creates and angle of 1° and another 10°... then the latter would appear 10 times bigger than the former... and thats how vision works... and even that can be proven but i dont want to get in to that here... optical instruments such as telescopes, binoculars, microscopes, etc... they alter the vision angle...
so for mars to appear as large as the moon it'll have a radius 470 times that of the moon!!!

here is a another fact you might be interested in....
the sun is 1 AU from earth and the moon is 0.0025 AU from earth.... so thats about 400 times....
the sun's radius is 696,000 km!!! and thats about 410 times!!!
so the sun and the moon appears to be that of the same size...
notice during solar total eclipses the moon covers the sun completely... but the corona can be seen...

so we can dismiss that claim as well... PFFTTTT!!!!!

next... This will cultivate on Aug. 27 when Mars comes within 34.65M miles of earth.
34.65 million miles = 0.37 AU
on 27 august 2007 mars is 1.1802 AU away from earth!!!!
on 27 august 2005 mars is 0.6896 AU away from earth!!!!

this hoax e-mail can be traced back to 2003... and nasa had issued a notice about it saying that its a hoax... even if you compare the astronomical data back in 2005 mars would be tens of thousands of times less brighter than the moon!

pls share this msg with whoever sends this hoax e-mail...
Share this with your friends as NO ONE ALIVE TODAY will ever see it again.
unless you're high on some vegetable substance... like... mallung... you'd see a normal sky... if you're high on mallung like the author of the hoax e-mail... then you might see something more than mars... heck you might even be the first person to step on mars!!!!