Heads up for the Mars and Moon show
Mars and the full Moon will pair up to provide a grand celestial spectacle tonight.
The Red Planet, now 62 million miles from Earth, will be at its brightest this year as it lines up opposite the Sun.
At around 9pm (BST), Mars will be above and to the left of the Moon, about the length of an outstretched fist away.
Robin Scagell, from the Society for Popular Astronomy, said: "Mars is looking really quite red and impressive at the moment, and the Moon will be full.
"It's going to be a great sight and rather fun to look for."
Just an ordinary pair of binoculars will do the job - and you'll be able to reveal an added bonus of the "beehive" star cluster between the two objects.
Mars is at its most spectacular when close to the Earth at opposition.
In 2003 the planet was just 35 million miles away as it faced the Sun, and more than four times brighter than it will be tonight.
Weird Science Factoid: English novelist Arnold Bennet drank a glass of water in a Paris hotel to prove it was safe. He died two months later of typhoid. Ooops!
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Daniel Smith - a long time ago, in a galaxy far away just north of Watford, Daniel fancied himself as a scientist but turned out to be the worst scientist since that bloke who mapped out all those canals on Mars that turned out to be scratches on his telescope's lens. Luckily, he is now not working on the Large Hadron Collider inadvertently creating a black hole that would swallow the world but is safely behind a desk writing this blog, bringing you the fantastical underbelly of nature... weird science.
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Thanks for the post is it true that the moon affects the tides. BUT, it means no threat to Earth. At most, it pulls them only as high as your hand is wide above what a usual perigee full moon pulls them to.
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Earthquakes are caused by events in the Earth's interior, of thermal pressure build-up of magma, and weakening a zone of the crust, or of pushing tectonic plates toward or away from each other.
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