In recent months, letters have been circulating on the Internet in which it is said that in August 2006 and especially on August 27, Mars will appear in the sky as large as the Moon, quite a few people ask if this is true - and it is not so
16.8.2006
By: Amir Burnett
Mars and the Moon as seen two weeks before the maximum proximity of the Earth and Mars. Photography - Amir Burnett.
In recent months, letters have been circulating on the Internet in which it is said that in August 2006 and especially on August 27, Mars will appear in the sky as large as the Moon, quite a few people ask if this is true - and it is not.
Mars is perhaps the most intriguing planet in the solar system - especially in terms of the possibility of life on it in the present or in the past, the thing that makes Mars so special is its great resemblance to the Earth, Mars also has solid ground, Mars also has an atmosphere (very thin) and even poles (although They mainly contain dry ice), on Mars there are clouds and also sandstorms that can sometimes cover even half of the face of the planet.
On August 27, 2003, Mars was closer to Earth than it would be in the next few centuries. At that time, quite a few emails were circulated stating that viewing Mars at 75x magnification would allow you to see it as large as the moon appears to the naked eye, most translations into Hebrew simply ignored the need for magnification through a telescope. For a reason that concerns the human soul more than the stars in the sky, updates of those emails continue to haunt us for three years, sometimes an unknown hand "corrects" 2003 to 2004/5/6. While there are astronomical events that repeat themselves every year, such as meteorite targets, Mars approaches the Earth once every 26 months, the last time Mars and the Earth were close was in October 2005, the next time will be in December 2007. Probably also in August 2006, a letter will arrive in your e-mail box saying that Mars will automatically Awe as big as the moon.
The history of hysteria around Mars
After Galileo included the telescope and improved it immeasurably, he observed the craters of the moon and the "ears" of Saturn, but Mars had to wait another 50 years - to 1659 and Christian Huygens who drew the first map of Mars to get initial knowledge about the red planet. In 1698 Huygens wrote the book "Cosmotheoros" in which he first proposed the idea that life, and perhaps even intelligent life, might exist on Mars, and on the other planets. And his hypothesis in a place where there is intelligent life is that there are those who deal with astronomy and it is a hypothesis that the Earth will be seen by Martians similar to the way we see Venus. Beyond the speculations about life, there are quite a few other mistakes in his book, such as the assessment that Jupiter and Saturn have solid ground. Perhaps the most amazing thing is how over the course of a hundred years the perception of the planets has changed from points of light moving across the sky to places where astronomers might live.
When William Herschel observed Mars in the middle of the 18th century, he described how after one of the poles of Mars "thaws" the other pole "freezes", in fact today we know that the poles of Mars are made of dry ice - carbon dioxide and not water, but Herschel concluded that the Martians must have made huge canals along Every planet to irrigate their cities. This idea was revived when in the middle of the 19th century an Italian astronomer named Giovanni Schiaparelli reported on "flow channels" he saw on the surface of Mars, he observed and cataloged the channels observed on Mars. The large channels were given names like Gihon and Pishon - like the rivers that come out of the Garden of Eden.
Schiapperelli's map of Mars from 1888
Channels and canals
One of the people who read Schiaparelli's reports was the American Percival Lowell, a capable and well-off astronomy enthusiast who devoted a considerable part of his time to the study of Martian "canals". Already in Lowell's time there were those who failed to observe these canals and it was indeed discovered that they are the product of an optical illusion in which the human mind "draws lines" between dark areas on the surface of Mars. To this day, Percival Lowell's name is commemorated in the observatory he founded and where the planet Pluto was discovered, some say that the name Pluto was chosen according to the first two letters in Percival Lowell's name Pel - RET.
Comparison of Mars - on the right Mars as observed by the Hubble Space Telescope in 2001, on the left a rendering of the same area after computer processing - credit NASA, Lowell Hess, Eugen Antoniadi, Roy A. Gallant. APOD
New questions open
When the Viking spacecraft reached Mars in the 70s of the 20th century, several "strange" bodies were observed in an area called "Sidonia Mesa", which was nicknamed the "Face of Mars" a hill about 2.5 km long, about two km wide and about 430 meters high which presented an admirable sight to human faces.
"Face of Mars" credit - NASA
"Face of Mars" as photographed by the MGS Credit - NASA
Since 1996, spacecraft have been launched to Mars every two years, almost like clockwork, and a spacecraft called the Mars Global Surveyor, or MGS for short, photographed the same area again, where it can be seen that the "face of Mars" is nothing more than a hill with a somewhat strange morphology. and that the great similarity observed by the Viking spacecraft was the result of light and shadow games and low resolution.
* Amir Barnett is a member of the Israel Astronomical Society and active in the southern branch of the society located in Be'er Sheva, on August 24 (2006) he will give a lecture on "Face and Tree Tracts on Mars" at the Givatayim Observatory
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