The scheduled lunar eclipse took place earlier today (since we have no way of preventing it!) but the vision from Hazelbrook was very poor. In fact, a cloud cover completely obscured our nearest neighbour, so I went back to bed. A lot of hot air is expended by the media whenever a lunar eclipse comes around with precious little said about the cosmos at any other time. Except, perhaps, for the race to Mars. And even that is just rummaging in the back yard.

Speaking of which, Mars made a surprise appearance in the meme community recently, with one such offering claiming that the (full) Moon and Mars would appear as the same size in the night sky, since Mars was at its closest approach to the Earth. It is hard to know whether this is a serious assertion or just an attempt at humour, though the image was earnestly distributed by folks on Facebook, as if genuine. So even if it's creation was deliberately mischievous, some people believed it.

When I was about 15 I was given a cheap little refracting telescope which I used to lash to a wooden beam that was sunk into the ground in our backyard. From atop this point I gazed at the shaking heavens (the stability of the system was seriously tested by even a slight breeze) but even so I could make my way about the heavens, picking out this planet or that star or even small fuzzy patches that I knew to be nebula. Sometimes I would gaze at the Red Planet, which presented, even at 40 times magnification, as a small red blurry dot in my lens. Even at that age, I knew that there was no chance that this planet would ever appear in the sky, the same size as the Moon, as if only a couple of million kilometres away. I suppose that it might be possible in extreme circumstances, such as where a Black Hole had entered the Solar System and was throwing the furniture around. In that case, the Martian proximity would be the least of our worries.

Never mind, the same minds who gave us the massive Mars probably had a hand in the Nibiru mystery, in which a large planet was supposed to have entered the Solar System unnoticed and had secreted itself behind the Sun.