I heard that on 27 August, Mars will be nearest from the earth and we will see two moons in the sky. Do you know how big will mars be seen?

ps: So sorry for off topic too far..

http://www.badastronomy.com/bad/news/index.html

A ha.. so it would only be as big as stars seen by naked eyes. So it just a rumor that it would seen as big as moon... Why people like to say bullshit?

I definitely noticed Mars the other night... looked up and there was an orange looking star, and my first thought was "oh, one of the planets... wonder which one it is?" (I was thinking Jupiter, but I just watched "2001: A Space Odyssey" the other day so that's probably the reason ).

I guess it must have been Mars. And yes, it did look like a slightly brighter and larger than usual star... nothing like the moon.

Speaking of bright planets, I've read that Venus is the only planet that sends enough light our way to cast visible shadows. I've confirmed that it does, but not that Mars doesn't.

Mars will be really friggin' bright (apparent visual magnitude -2.9). During favorable oppositions it gets brighter than Jupiter, but not Venus. At it's minimum, mars is magnitude 1.8 ish (notice the wide swing). Venus gets to around -4.6 at its brightest. So, I strongly doubt that Mars will be casting a shadow. Venus probably only does during very favorable conditions.

In any event, Mars won't appear big without visual aid. It'll just look like a very bright salmon-colored star that moves each night and doesn't twinkle. It'll be a good time to get out a telescope though since it hasn't been this close for 60,000 years. Even during favorable oppositions though, Mars is a difficult telescopic target. The surface is low-contrast and it's got a pretty small angular diameter. Worse during these close passes (which always occur during our Northern hemisphere summer because of the geometry of the orbits), Mars is always low in the Sothern sky, resulting in more atmospheric distortion. Good viewing for Aussies though.

Saturn and Jupiter are better any time you can find them in the night sky (you can see the four Galilean moons of Jupiter with a simple pair of 7x50 or 10x50 binoculars.) OTOH, I perfer the faint fuzzies, but my current residence pretty well rules out getting a view of those without a significant drive. Too bad I had clouds during the blackout.

http://cfa-www.harvard.edu/icq/MagScale.html

And what will this mean from an astrological perspective?

Mars is the ruling planet for Scorpio and Aries. (Sharing that title with Pluto for Scorpio). Mars was also the Roman god of war, which is a prominently portrayed feature of both of these signs (though no Scorpio or Aries would ever admit it).

As Mars comes closer to Earth, the qualities that define Aries and Scorpio will become more pronounced. To greatly over-simplify it, this means more stubbornness, more inner conflict and more arguments for these two signs, and these aspects will certainly affect the people they are close to.

Other water and fire signs will ironically have greater trouble understanding their Aries/Scorpio counterparts during this time, as they have their own stubborn and argumentative streaks built-in. Air and earth signs will have an easier time with this, the earth signs (as always) acting/responding in the most practical way, and air signs letting it "pass through them" without dwelling on it. Luckily, my g/f is a Taurus, so I foresee no problems for us. (With me being on the Scorpio side of the Scorpio/Libra cusp.)

Oh, and for reference:

Water signs = Scorpio, Cancer, Pisces
Fire signs = Aries, Leo, Sagittarius
Earth signs = Taurus, Virgo, Capricorn
Air signs = Aquarius, Gemini, Libra

Not that I'm not also very scientifically minded...astronomy use to be one of my favorite past times (worked in a planetarium for 7 years). Just thought I'd give astrology a fair showing too in this matter...

Why not? There's no conflict between astronomy and astrology, within their own spheres (no pun intended ).

Astrology?!? Hey what happened to being an objectivist scientific forum? What about rule 8? ABX results please!

Gravitationally speaking, Mars has about as much influence on you (force wise) as a six-pack sitting at arms length. Also, the tidal forces of the six pack are many orders of magnitude stronger.

In all seriousness though (and I'm not trying to insult anyone or get in a fight), things like astrology are used every day to defraud and rob gullible and uniformed people. Worse, too many people don't know the difference between astrology (bupkis) and astronomy (science) or think they're the same thing (if you don't believe me, try reading sci.astro for a while). Astrologists actively encourage ignorance. Nobody would think it was "just fun and games" if somebody went around preventing gullible people from learning how to read.

If you don't think heavenly bodies affect things here on earth you should see how something like a solar eclipse or meteor shower can make the clouds roll in.

Touché.

Mmmmm. Beer...



What a bunch of crap.
























J/K - I'm an Aries and, well, you know. Tidal 6-packs and all...

Speaking of ABXing, I've got my first two test cases:

phong = Scorpio. MachineHead = Aries. Right?

Just kidding! And no, I'm not blessed with the power to guess someone's sign. Although in my chart, Neptune is in Scorpio, which gives me psychic powers... (<--sarcasm)

Really, though, I think the most important thing here about astrology (as for everything else discussed in the OT forum) is to take it light-heartedly, as that was my intent. Certainly not to instill fear of the unknown. For example, I'm an agnostic, but I don't fear/attack Christians.

Not really feeling hostility or anything, but I wonder if this could be added to the list of topics most likely to start a fight around here...

- Do you believe in God?

- Are you a Democrat or a Republican?

- What is your favorite codec, and why?

- Astrology...real or surreal?

A solar eclipse affects earth strongly because the solar radiation is very powerful on earth's surface. During an eclipse, the earth's surface is cut from the solar light.
But a mars eclipse won't have any effect on earth exept making amateur astronomers go out in order to take pictures with their telescopes.
A meteor shower won't have any effect on the weather, or did you mean an asteroid shower, or a polar light ?

An opposite example : we stand on a planet that "weights" 6,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 of tons, that achieves a revolution in 24 hours. At 45° of latitude, we move at 1100 km/h. And we can't even feel it. The earth seem flat and still to our senses.

EDIT

The movement of a planet on which we stand being quite undetectable, tell me about the movement of a planet standing 50,000,000 kilometers away !

I've read somewhere that some animals, kind of turtle, are able to detect the movement of the sun, I mean they can feel the movement by their sense. Earth movement is so constant that we can't feel it, but by seeing other object move we say that we are moving.

Can we say that some animal can feel the movement of the earth?

So what are you trying to say?
lol

Technically, a human cannot "feel" motion. This is probably true for any animal. You can detect acceleration or deceleration, but not motion. Whether the surface of the earth was moving at 1100 km/h, or 1000000 km/h or 2 km/h, a person could not detect the motion, nor what speed they were moving. They could detect symptoms of the speed difference in climate, the apparent speed of the sun crossing the sky, etc., but not specifically a difference in speed of motion.

Just like in a car, if you're not accelerating or decelerating, then you can't feel motion. You can feel bumps in the road, hear the engine RPM, and so forth. But you can't feel motion, and you can't determine how fast you're moving by feel alone. When the car slows down or speeds up, THAT you can feel. However at a constant speed, and eliminating a bumpy road, a noisy road surface, engine noise, wind noise, and as long as the speed is constant, you couldn't tell by feel whether you were going 5 kph or 200 kph.

If the rotation of the earth were to speed up or slow down, that could be felt. But as long as variance in the speed of the earth's rotation remains below a detectable threshold, we'll never "feel the earth turning".

That doesn't mean that it's not turning, and it doesn't mean that it's turning doesn't have many other effects on us even though we can't "feel the motion". The same concept applies to not being able to feel the effects of Mars, or the Moon, or any other body in the universe.

Who knows what has an effect on us and what doesn't?

Just as a clarification ( i really dont plan to run into a discussion about this ), the theory behind astrology was never that the stars have an 'influence' on humans or mankind, but its the theory of a micro-cosmos / macro-cosmos projection behind it.

In layman terms, the sky ( macro-cosmos ) can be seen as a 'mirror' for whats happening on the earth ( micro-cosmos ), an observation based on the ever-returning multiple analogies in our universe .....

Nope, but feel free to keep guessing. I thought I had given it away by now. No fair looking up my birthday though (I can think of at least four internet-accessable places where it can be found). In spite of the fact that I seem to exhibit a number of attributes that are supposed to be associated with my sign, I can't recall anyone ever guessing it correctly.

Nah, I won't cheat and look it up anywhere. Anyway, I've skillfully got it narrowed down to 11 signs anyway. Since many people would argue that symbolizes the overall accuracy of astrology, I won't go any further.

As for psychic abilities, I won't delve into details, just don't cross any streets next Thursday...

That's not difficult. We can first detect it with our eyes. It's not at the same place all day. A blind person can feel the heat on his face too.


The movement of the earth manifests itself in the Coriolis effect. A small force pulls any object moving very fast in a straight line on earth surface to the right in the northern hemisphere, and to the left in the southern hemisphere. Some even said that the right hand railways rails are more weared the the left hand ones in the northern hemisphere, but actually, this is false. The difference of wearing depends mainly on the winds that blow on the railway.

Another urban legend : the water running at the bottom of a sink would rotate clockwise in the norhtern hemisphere and counterclockwise in the southern hemisphere.
This can be verified in very thouroughly controlled conditions in a laboratory, but certainly not in the sink of your kitchen. The initial momentum of the water is amplified as it sinks. Thus if the initial average rotation speed of the water in the sink is only due to the earth rotation, it works.
But at 45 ° of latitude, the average natural rotation speed of an object on earth's surface is about one rotation every 34 hours ! If you can pull the stopper of your sink without moving the water faster than one rotation every 34 hours, it's ok.
Otherwise, it will turn clockwise half of the time, and counterclockwise the other half, depending on the initial movements inside the water.

An easier and more interesting way to show earth's movement is the Foucault Pendulum.
Here's a webpage about the experiment : http://visite.artsetmetiers.free.fr/site_a...m_museum_a.html

Foucault's Pendulum is an interesting project. We had an example of Foucault's Pendulum at the museum I worked for when I was a teenager, just outside the planetarium entrance. I never measured exactly how long it took to complete one rotation, though. I would just notice that after a half-hour or so between times I would walk by it that the pendulum was swinging in a different orientation. "Hey look, the earth hasn't stopped turning yet!"

I think you got a wrong perception. If you see a train moving at 30 m/h, you can see and say that it's moving clearly because it's fast enough, but if you see the sun, you won't say that it's moving because it's movement is very slow. Off course 1 hour later you can say it's moving since the position has changed, but you can't feel it's movement. Do you get my point?

Yes, I see. Actually, the sun's movement is not far below the threshold of perception. Looking at a shadow cast far away. I can't tell that it's moving, though I have the feeling that it moves. But after one minute, it's clear that it moves.