Bad Astronomy

I'm still amazed at the sheer volume of bad astronomy that's out there. I teach English and History to secondary school students. We were discussing symbols and so on in poetry on Tuesday when the moon came up as a symbol for madness. I asked if anyone had seen the nearly full moon on Monday evening with Mars beside it. Lots of enthusiastic yes's and so we talked about Mars for a while.
Now my classroom is decorated with Star charts, photos of objects, leaflets and flyers, but these kids straight away assumed that the guy on Sky News knew more about Mars than I did!
Did you know ...
Mars will not be visible from Earth for another 60,000 years.
Mars orbits in an oval, whil Earth orbits in a perfect circle.
A conjunction of the Moon and Mars is a once-in-a-lifetme experience.
I am amazed that with so much being made of the recent close apparition of Mars that people can still be misinformed. Anyone else out there have any similar experiences to speak of?

The one thing that really amazes me is that there's a huge amount of people who don't realise that you can see the moon during the day. They've been amazed when I've been able to point up at it and say "sure it is, look - it's right there!".

I have had people argue with me that it is physically impossible to see jupiter and satrun with the unaided eye and even when I pointed to the sky and said "look there they are" people still refused ot believe me!

Has anyone in Ireland ever had a brush with a Creationist? I've only ever heard of it happening in the US...I suppose there are some here (and probably everywhere), but I've never encountered any myself.

Don't know what I'd say to them if I did...

I was in UCD last year for a schools debate. It's my old stomping ground so I picked up a copy of one of the student newspapers. The big debate at the time seemed to be about the appointment of a creationist welfare officer to the student's union. Rather than being sceptics, our students seem to be going backwards!
On the bad astronomy front, yeah I've had the whole "the moon only comes out when it's dark" experience, as well as having a student bet cold hard cash with me that Polaris is the brightest star in the sky! He was a boy scout who believed he could always find north. Just hope it isn't Winter and Sirius is up when he goes hunting for north!