• Question: why is the moon so bright

    Asked by daisy to Jake, James, Pete, Senga, Simonne on 9 Nov 2017.
    • Photo: Simonne Weeks

      Simonne Weeks answered on 9 Nov 2017:

      what a great question Daisy. The Moon doesn’t actually have its own light it’s surface reflects the light of the Sun.

    • Photo: Senga Robertson

      Senga Robertson answered on 9 Nov 2017:

      Hi Daisy

      brilliant question!

      So the moon looks like it shines because it reflects light from the sun. What’s crazy is that even though the moon can look really bright it only reflects 3-12% of the suns light….that’s probably a good thing though, if it reflected a lot more of the suns light it would probably be pretty hard to get to sleep at night!

      Senga 🙂

    • Photo: Jake Langham

      Jake Langham answered on 10 Nov 2017:

      Maybe I can convince you that it’s not surprising that the moon is so bright. After all, it seems funny to think of a rock as ‘reflecting’ light (though it really does reflect a little bit). So imagine you’re in a completely dark room and you hold up a tennis ball at arms length up and in front of you. Then you get a friend to shine a torch light behind your back. You’ll be able to see the tennis ball very well, even though the light is behind you. This is the same situation as the moon – it is lit up by the Sun, a very bright light which at night is shining behind us.

Comments