Estimated read time: 1-2 minutes
This archived news story is available only for your personal, non-commercial use. Information in the story may be outdated or superseded by additional information. Reading or replaying the story in its archived form does not constitute a republication of the story.
Is this email true? Will Mars be closer to the earth than ever before?? Thanks!
Sarah S.
**********************************************************
I won't post the whole email but the first line says something like "The Red Planet will be spectacular". Anyway it's untrue and we keep getting emails asking about this, last summer we had the same thing happen.
Mars was closest to the earth in 2003, not this summer or this August. There's a link on the right to more info about this.
For August though we have a great meteor shower coming up called the Perseids. These peak on August 12th, you'll be able to see 50 to 60 shooting stars in an hour! The days to check this out are August 11-13th and get away from city lights, before dawn is best.
The other email we're repeatedly getting is this business about a fire rainbow. Ok first of all it's not a fire rainbow, it's just ice crystals in the sky. Again a link on the right has been posted. This circumhorizontal arc isn't that rare, if there's ice crystals in the sky, there's bound to be some bending of light and thus, the creation of awesome optical effects. Fire rainbow might be a nickname for this feature but it isn't fire related.
Happy sky watching!
Answered by KSL Meteorologist Dina Freedman.
