Is this what the Moon/Mars hoax is all about?

I don't fully understand this hoax but I can tell you a small part of it. Very soon again the planet Mars will be at its closest position to planet Earth. It will be about 35,000,000 miles away from us. For reasons I do not fully understand, many people have said in multiple forums that Mars will be only 35 miles from Earth and appear as large as the moon in the sky... This is ridiculous of course as this would be a global calamity! 35 miles is within the Earth's atmosphere! Heck the moon is about 250,000 miles away!

Anyway...I'll follow your postings and read more on the rest of this hoax; I've told you all that I know above.

Yes yes... It is from an old report or email years ago...I just meant that Mars's orbit is again returning the planet to the nearest point. Which is still 35,000,000 miles away.. give or take.

I didn't mean to suggest that this was a new hoax, just a persistent one that seems to change a bit every year.

Good Luck!

No, it came from an event in 2003. On August 27 2003, Mars was closer to Earth than it had been in a very long time. It was a very close perihelic opposition. Still, it was still just a point of light in the sky. There was an email that circulated about the event, and it contained the following (very true) statement with an unfortunate line break like so:

"Mars will appear as large as the moon

in a telescope at 75 power"

As you can see, if you delete the second line, you get the wonderful hoax you do now. The email didn't mention the year, as it was pretty obvious at the time. The e-mail got recirculated in slightly modified form in 2004, and it balooned from there. Now there are completely new forms of this email getting circulating around that are based on the erroneous edited version from a few years ago. It will probably go around every year around August for awhile, and people will believe it and forward it on.

I guess some people just get a kick out of getting people to believe complete nonsense.

Partly.

The hoax started in 2003, when Mars was closer at opposition (only 34 million miles) than it had been in centuries.

Someone (or a group of someones) that either had no scientific education or just wanted to freak out people, emailed that Mars would be close enough to Earth to look like a second moon. The current email going around has conveniently left out the year 2003, but included other details (such as "Mars will be as close as 34.65 miles" where they conveniently left out the word "million").

In reality, the email misquoted out of context part of an article that stated that in a 8" TELESCOPE, Mars would appear almost as large as the full moon does to us on Earth.

Believe me, non-scientists don't notice conjunctions in the sky - they just don't bother looking up ever.

You'll notice (if you find the email going around) that it doesn't mention the lunar eclipse at all. You'd think that would be significant as well. But its because there wasn't a lunar eclipse in 2003 at the time of Mars' opposition.

No it is not. But once the ecljpse starts and the moon colour changes and shines in the colour of the earths shadow they will convince themselves that either the moon has disappeared diring the eclipse ( or too dark to be seen) and what they are looking at is Mars. Alternately some people are of the opinion that Mars and the moon will swap places.

The eclipse will bring all sorts or weird phone calls to observatories and planetariiums from people who have suddenly noticed something unusual and want an explanation .

The hoax email comes up at this time every year since 2003, but the perpetrators must be laughing themselves silly knowing that, by coincidence, the eclipse happens one day later and will turn the moon red, at least from North America west to Australasia.

What Arkilius says is right. This silly story has been making the rounds on the internet every August for the last 4 years. It doesn't have to do with an eclipse.

I don't know about you, but I'll be cowering under the bed in case Mars falls in my backyard! But if it does, I'll be selling those nifty rovers on eBay tomorrow!

Unfortunately, no. There are actually poeple out there that believe that Mars will look as big as the Moon. I know, hard to imagine. Thanks for correcting some of them.

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it's complete bullshit

give me a thumbs down if you agree.