I hate being the buzzkill brother

Yesterday, my sister B sent me (and about 100 other people, looking at the To: list) a pretty cool-sounding email:

Planet Mars will be the brightest in the night sky starting August.It will look as large as the full moon to the naked eye. This will maximize on Aug. 27 when Mars comes within 34.65M miles of earth. Be sure to watch the sky on Aug. 27 12:30 am. It will look like the earth has 2 moons. The next time Mars may come this close is in 2287. Share this with your friends as NO ONE ALIVE TODAY will ever see it again.

Now, I'm a pretty big sucker for cool space news. I've woken my daughter up at 3:30 in the morning to go out onto a near-freezing patio to lie on sleeping bags and watch for meteor showers, so this sounded interesting. I Googled it, hoping that Space.com or someplace similar would have specifics about the best viewing time for my part of the country.

I suppose in retrospect, I should have guessed what I'd find. "Share this with your friends" should have been a big clue, and the breathless (and all-caps) admonition that "NO ONE ALIVE TODAY" would ever see this event should have thrown up red flags. But it still took me by mild surprise when a snopes entry for it came up. And of course, if I were as big an astronomy buff as I made myself out to be, the inclusion of the time (12:30 AM) without a time zone (e.g. 12:30 AM GMT) or a location (12:30 AM in the Central U.S.), or information about where it will be best viewed from should have been the final nail.

So naturally, I had to send mail back to my sister, telling her that it was untrue. In the past, I've been an asshole and replied back to her and everyone she sent it to, but she ripped me a new one the last time I did that, so I just sent her the link and told her that I was only sending the information to her, and she should do with it whatever she wanted. She sent out the retraction, "My brother brought it to my attention that the 2 moons message I forwarded is an internet hoax" to the entire To: list of her original message.

The weird part is that I feel bad about it. I can comfort myself knowing that no one will be looking at the sky on August 27, expecting to see a big-ass Mars (turns out the whole "two moons" illusion is a misrepresentation of how Mars would appear if you used a 75x telescope to look at it at that 34M mile distance...it would look as big in the telescope as the Moon looks to the naked eye, as I understand it). But, I know most of the people on that To: list, and I'm probably the only one who'd actually mark his calendar and try to see it, and I already knew it was crap. I feel like I just pissed in everyone's Wheaties, because thanks to me debunking B's message, the world is a slightly less-wondrous place.

So, the question to my imaginary readers is this: should I have just sat on the information, maybe use it as interesting dinner conversation at Thanksgiving (the next time I'm home), or did I do the "right thing?