When you're out side at night and you look up at the sky and see the bright smiling moon bright, do you wonder why it is shining?
The Moon Has No Light, It Doesn't Shine!
If you have ever said the moon is shining, then you need to read this because the moon has no light to make it shine...
"The sun is 'shining" we would say as kids. But was it?
It was not only us kids that thought the moon 'shines', as our parents, evidenced NTA's 'Tales By MOONLIGHT', which we loved in those days, also thought the same.
Well, sorry to burst your bubble, our darling moon has no light of its own!
Bizarre as this may sound, the Moon is actually very dark - like coal, and it doesn’t just glow on its own. It only borrows from the magnanimous sun.
From ancient times, it has been thought that the Moon, like the sun, produced its own light but, I tell you, this is definitely not the case – our Moon only reflects the light of the Sun in accordance with its orbital position!
The shining of the moon at night is the reflection of the sun bouncing off the surface of the moon, appearing to us on Earth as the moon shining.
"When astronauts walked on the surface, they reported that it was dark grey, the color of pavement. Because of its dark color and bumpy surface, it only reflects about 12% of the light that hits it," Universe Today says on its website.
So the light coming from the Moon at night is an illusion, a fraud... you’re actually seeing the reflected light from the Sun, bouncing off the Moon - like flashing a torchlight at a mirror and seeing the reflection elsewhere.
The entire Moon does not constantly reflect light – only the half in direct view of the Sun. As the Moon is tidally locked to the Earth (ie we only ever see one face), our view of the lit half changes constantly, ranging from a disc to a thin crescent. On a full Moon, the Sun is directly lined up with the Earth-Moon line; when we see a thin crescent, on the other hand, the Sun is illuminating just the side," How It Works wrote.
It should also be noted that the amount of light we get from the Moon depends on the point of its orbit.
"During its first and last quarters, the Moon is half illuminated, but it’s only 8% as bright when it’s full. During the full Moon, it’s so bright that it obscures fainter objects in the night sky. When the Moon is highly illuminated, it reflects so much light we can even see it during the day,” Universe Today explains.
In other words, what we call 'moonshine' (or moon is shining) is actually 'sunshine' reflected by the Moon.
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