Tuesday, June 21, 2005

"Moon illusion" & rumours of Mars

OK, is this cool, or what?

Moonrise tonight here in New York, New York will be at 8:39 - I'll be out on the water. Cool cool cool.

Reports of Mars being the size of the full moon to the naked eye this August are sadly exaggerated, though. I got an email from a relative last night talking about getting very close to Mars this August - I'm always interested in this stuff, but I was a little confused because I'd thought part of why getting so close to Mars in 2003 was so exciting was because this was so unusual, a once in a multiple-generations-of-human-lifetimes event - then I got to the sentence that started "Mars will appear as large as the full moon to the naked eye" and I thought back to the very bright and discernably reddish pinpoint of light we all got so excited over in '03 and went straight to Snopes.com.

And on second thought, I'm actually NOT all disappointed that this turns out to just have been a really old email with an unfortunately located paragraph break that got put in sometime during the 2 years its' been circulating, something would be rather amiss if Mars EVER looked that big to the naked eye.

I guess finding out that that business with the giant orca leaping from the water & pulling a kayaker down into the water behind himself when he lands, and the resultant Most Spectacular Combat Roll Of All Time, was just a fantastically well-edited Powerade commercial from Japan will continue to hold my A-#1 spot in my list of most disappointing Mikkelsonian bubble-bursting moments.

ok, blog break over, much work to get done if I really hope to watch the moon rise from the water, not from my office!

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