TWO MOONS ON AUGUST 27; NOTHING BUT A HOAX

August 25, 2014

It is quite amazing that the two moon story (a hoax indeed) which first appeared in the summer of 2003 as an email, still manages to find space in the electronic as well as print media.

The doctored image that is being used
to spread the rumor

The hoax, which already had a long run, got a fresh lease of life when somebody, perhaps to play a prank, picked up the image from the Russian site Dream World’s gallery titled “fanciful double-moon images” and shared it on the facebook on August 2013. Soon the image post went viral.

How excited people are about it is reflected from the fact that when I started writing this blogpost, the doctored two moon image (reproduced on the left) on the facebook page garnered 855,568 shares. After 4 hrs when I finished writing, the number of facebook share rose to 859,599. That means 4031 facebook users shared the post in a matter of just 4 hours, which further mean that every minute, more than 16 facebook users are becoming part of the longest run hoax.

Huh! the number of likes and shares will surely go further north since the issue is not completely untrue. According to Wikipedia, it all began from a misinterpretation and exaggeration of a sentence in an e-mail message that reported the close encounter between Mars and Earth in August 2003. At that time, the distance between the two planets was about 5,758,000 kilometers, which was the closest since September 24, 57,617 BC.

But as far as August 27th, 2014 is concerned, the moon will not be full on that day; it would appear briefly as a thin crescent in the west after sunset. Therefore even if we leave Science aside and allow our imagination to go wild, the question of having two moons on the sky would not arise.

To be precise, during 2003 when Mars had a close encounter with earth, it appeared approximately 6 times larger and 85 times brighter in the sky than it ordinarily does, but it did not appear as large as the full moon. In fact Mars can never appear as large as a full moon to an Earth bound observer since Mars’ diameter is about 1/140th the diameter of the full moon. This means one would need to arrange 140 Mars to equal the moon’s diameter. For the matter of record, during the 2003 encounter, Mars was the brightest object in the Sky after Sun, Moon and Venus.

The prankster perhaps knew, some part of the original email was true at some point of time, therefore tweaked it a little and shared it to lure some of us to spend our night gazing the sky fruitlessly. Those who receive the message get so excited about it that they eventually share the message thus (every year) during August we see this hoax being repeated again and again.

I wrote about it in detail in the 2010 article titled A Hoax called Two Moons which could be accessed following the link. From the article one could understand close encounters with Mars is not very uncommon. The claim that "NO ONE ALIVE TODAY WILL EVER SEE THIS AGAIN!" is misleading. One may argue that next close encounter (as in 2003) with Mars is scheduled on August 28th, 2287 but in the mean time, there will be plenty of other close approaches, so our children, grand children, great grand children are not likely to miss out anything.

Given the rapid advancements in Science and Technology, perhaps some of our descendants could observe the close encounter from the Martian perspective during the year 2287. I am quite sure about that. What about you?