ၾသဂုတ္လမွ စတင္၍ အဂၤါျဂိဳလ္ဟာ အထြန္းလင္း အေတာက္ပဆံုး ျဖစ္ပါလိမ့္မည္။
၄င္းျဂိဳလ္ဟာ ၾကီးမားေတာက္ပတဲ့ လတစ္စင္းပမာ အစြမ္းကုန္ ထြန္းလင္း
ေတာက္ပမွာပါ။ ၾသဂုတ္လ 27ရက္ေန႔မွာ အဂၤါ ျဂိဳလ္ဟာကမၻာနဲ႔
မိုင္ေပါင္း 34.65 M miles စတင္ နီးကပ္လာမွာ ျဖစ္တယ္လို႔
သိပၸံပညာရွင္ေတြက ေၾကျငာထား ပါတယ္။ဒါေၾကာင့္27th ၾသဂုတ္လ12:30AMမွာ
ေကာင္းကင္မွာ လႏွစ္စင္း ပမာ ထြန္းလင္းတာကို ေတြ႔ျမင္ၾက
ရမွာပါတဲ့။ဒီတစ္ၾကိမ္မွာ မၾကည့္လိုက္ ရရင္ေတာ့ အဂၤါျဂိဳလ္ဟာ ကမၻာနဲ႔
နီးကပ္လာဖို႔ကို ေနာက္ႏွစ္ 2287ခုႏွစ္ထိ ေစာင့္ၾကရ မွာ
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Two Moons on August 27

Some things never go out of style, and this "Mars Spectacular" message is one of them. It's yet another example of a widely-circulated e-mail containing information that was once true but which continues to be forwarded around year after year, long after the information it contains has become outdated.

Mars did make an extraordinarily close approach to Earth several years ago, culminating 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 ordinarily does. (The earlier message quoted above was often reproduced with an unfortunate line break in the middle of the third 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" without realizing that the statement only applied to those viewing Mars through a telescope 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 had another close encounter with Earth in in 2005, but that occurrence took place in October (not August), and the red planet appeared about 20% smaller than it did during similar circumstances in 2003. Mars also made a close approach to Earth in December 2007, but even then it was still about 55 million miles away from us, not nearly as close as it was in 2003 or 2005. Not until 2018 will our view of Mars be similar to the one that was available in 2003, and it won't be until the year 2287 that Mars will come closer to Earth than it did back in 2003.

As Texas astronomer Torvald Hessel observed in a 2006 interview about the perennial "Mars Spectacular" message:
Q: What's the truth?

A: Mars gets close to Earth every two years. So, last year, Mars was very close. Three years ago, it was spectacularly close ... And right now, I'm sad to say, Mars is actually behind the Sun; we can't see it at all.

Q: How wide spread is this falsehood?

A: People get excited about it, start to send e-mail ... and every August we see this e-mail coming back and I get a lot of e-mails about it, of course.
The web site of the Students for the Exploration and Development of Space (SEDS) provides a chart displaying data about Mars Oppositions (past, present, and future), and the web site of the Hubble Heritage Project offers some nice composite telescope images from previous Mars near oppositions.

Labels: News-II, Over Sea