One of the great things about people knowing I love my photography, is getting sent interesting links about interesting events, web sites and camera gear news. So what if you get sent the same thing a few times. It takes the click of a mouse to delete an email. I often do get the same email over and over, but the one that has been flooding my inbox the last 3 weeks, and I reckon I have received it 20 times now, has gotten me to the point of wanting to place a rather large telescope into a part of the email senders anatomy that really isn’t designed to accept a rather large telescope!

Anyone recognise this?

Maybe you have been sent it too. It has been doing the rounds for a few years now. You probably did what I did the 1st few times, and laughed it off as a bit of a gag, I mean to say, Mars is a bloody long way away. Depending on where you look, it can be anywhere for 30,000,000 km to 55,000,000 km. Hardly a leisurely stroll to the corner store, even if it wobbles around the sun at 24k per second, thats a fairly long commute to get close to us! Given the distance between the earth and that huge chunk of cheese we call the moon is about 384,403 km, give or take a kilometre between friends, that is slightly closer to us than our little red buddy. Ok, I don’t know these figures off the top of my head, Stephen Hawkins I am not, but surely some common sense applied to the email above would have people smelling a rat the size of an elephant.

I know this will probably freak some people out, but no everything on the interwebs is 100% correct. See my figures above for a prime example. Even, the Gen-Y kiddies might want to pull up a chair here, Wikipedia, is full of rubbish. Yes, probably most of it is true, but there are still parts that are false.

So next time you get an email that sounds too good to be true, maybe something like Uranus is dropping in for a chat (badda bing!), have a think before you fire it off to everyone in your address book.

Further reading.

http://www.floridastars.org/MARSHOAX.HTML
http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2005/07jul_marshoax.htm
http://www.snopes.com/science/astronomy/brightmars.asp