Biggest Full Moon in 19 Years

On March 19th, the moon will be closer--and thus bigger--than it's been in two decades

Mars WON'T get as big as the Moon in our sky Aug 27...

Although it sounds cool, the email making the rounds lately about Mars is bogus. The emails are worded thusly:

27th Aug the Whole World is waiting for.............

Planet Mars will be the brightest in the night sky starting August. It will look

as large as the full moon to the naked eye. This will cultivate on Aug. 27 when

Mars comes within 34.65M miles off earth. Be sure to watch the sky on Aug. 27

12:30 am. It will look like the earth has 2 moons.

The next time Mars may come this close is in 2287.

Share this with your friends as NO ONE ALIVE TODAY will ever see it again.

Here is what the Urban Myth debunker SNOPES has to say:

Origins:   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once true but which continues to be forwarded around year after year, long after the information it contains has become outdated.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.)

I hope I didn't burst any bubbles but mad forwarding of bullshit is a pet peeve of mine...

Millions of Tons of Water Ice Found at Moon’s North Pole

Millions of Tons of Water Ice Found at Moon’s North Pole
By Tia Ghose March 1, 2010

A moon probe has found millions of tons of water on the moon’s north pole, NASA reported Monday. The vast source of water could one day be used to generate oxygen or sustain a moon base.

A NASA radar aboard India’s Chandrayaan-I lunar orbiter found 40 craters, ranging in size from 1 to 9 miles across, with pockets of ice. Scientists estimate at least 600 million tons of ice could be entombed in these craters.

The radar, called the Mini-SAR, sends pulses of left-polarized radio waves out to measure the surface roughness of the moon. While smooth surfaces send back a reversed, right-polarized wave, rough areas return left-polarized waves.

Ice, which is transparent to radio waves, also sends back left-polarized waves. The Mini-SAR measures the ratio of left to right circular polarized power sent back, or the circular polarized ratio (CPR). However, a high CPR alone can’t distinguish between rough patches and regions with ice.

The north pole craters had a high CPR on the inside, with a low CPR on the edges. That suggests a material enclosed in the craters, rather than surface roughness, caused the high CPR signal. According to NASA, the ice would have to be relatively pure ice and at least several feet thick to give this signature.

In November, NASA crashed a probe into the Cabeus crater near the moon’s south pole and also found evidence of water.