Serious... no, Mars will NEVER be visible as big as The Moon!! And you can absolutely believe it, without any doubts.

One of the most famous fake news  talking about astronomy on Internet is about Mars, the Red Planet. Come on, don't tell me that you haven't red that "tonight 27th of August Mars will be visible as big as full Moon"

(image from Getty Images)

Well, but why? How can you demonstrate it? A very good solution, the only possible in my honest opinion, is solving little math operations:

talking about properties of celestial body, there is just one factor that we must consider: the angular diameter! What the hell is this??? Simply, it's the angle formed by the diameter of a planet (or any celestial body you prefer) relationed to the distance with respect of your observation point (the planet Earth)

Well, you can find this data easily (thank you NASA), it's a property of all celestial bodies.

Let's see, angular diameter for the Moon is 0,5° and for Mars is 0,0036°.

We need another data for our operations: obviously, the real diameter! For the Moon 3474 km, for Mars 6779 km

Now the final question: How far Mars should be to have the same dimension as the Moon? which means that Mars should have the same angular diameter as the Moon (0,5°).

And then, come on, let's pick our scientific calculators and calculate!!   Tan 0,5 = Mars diameter/distance

We will find approximately a value of 777 000 km. The minimum distance of Mars far from Earth was 53 millions of km!!!

You can find the explanation even in Italian language, written by myself, clicking HERE

In the next article i will explain where this fake news came from. Follow me and stay tuned!