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It's that time of year again for practical jokes and hoaxes. In France, April 1st involves Poissons d'Avril, April fish! And astronomers have been known to have a little joke on the day too.

Astronomical April Fools
Mercury has a moon? The Jovian-Plutonian Gravitational Effect will give you a floating feeling? The Space Station has an alien visitor? Virgin Galactic has bought Pluto and has plans for getting it reinstated as a planet? Nope. These are a examples of April Fool hoaxes and jokes.

On April 1, 2004 Children's BBC announced that astronomers had decided to rename Solar System bodies after characters from Lord of the Rings. The Earth would be known as Gandalf. (That's not such a bad idea since our own planet is the only one without a proper name.) Mars would become Frodo. Poor Pluto would be known as Sauron. And the Moon would be Gollum.

Walter Scott Houston was an American amateur astronomer and astronomy popularizer. On April 1, 1959 he published an article under the name of fictitious Dr. Arthur Hayall of the fictitious University of the Sierras. He said that the moons of Mars, Deimos and Phobos, were artificial satellites. Good joke! But years later Russian scientist Iosif Shklovsky seriously suggested something similar, saying that Phobos's low density indicated that it was hollow. More recently, Richard Hoagland maintains that Phobos is hollow. But then he also continues to insist that the “Face” on Mars is real despite what high resolution photographs now show.

It makes it hard to pick out the hoaxes.

Astronomy Picture of the Day (APOD) did came through with a jokey picture for April 1st. It's just the thing for the cow who jumps over the Moon: a Lunar Grazing Module (LGM) “multi-purpose celestial bovine containment system”. Ot maybe it is really just an art work named "Mooooonwalk" which is on display at a popular science museum. But they don't say which one.