The elder sageling is going to be disappointed. His class received the "Mars is going to be really big" email. I was excited for a little while and did some research for a link to share here. This is when I found the site for Astronomical Society of South Australia. It contains this article.
It describes the email almost perfectly. There were pictures of Mars and Luna[1] side by side, the date of August 27, the suggestion that the next time this will happen will be in 2287 and the encouragement to pass this on to your friends.
I remember thinking to myself "didn't this happen not so long ago with far less spectacular results"? And it did. It was in 2003. I remember because I got up to see it. Well, I saw an object in the sky roughly where Mars should be. It didn't look very close =) Yet I was happy to see it because Brisbane seems to have notoriously bad weather at times when there are interesting things to see in the sky.
And now I will have to break the news to the sageling and the rest of the class. Still, if this fosters an interest in astronomy in my two children I will be most pleased.
Since we are on the topic of Mars, I will leave you with this link. It is from Gustav Holst suite The Planets and is suitably titled Mars: The Bringer Of War. It is a static picture of Mars, but here it is the music that is important. Please enjoy it.
Thank-you for reading.
[1] Even when I was a sageling I could not understand why every celestial body in the solar system (and many beyond it) had "cool" names, yet the Earth's satellite is simply called "the Moon". When I remember I like to refer to the Moon by its Latin name.
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