HOW THE MOON SHINES

NATURE OF MOON

  The moon is made up of large dark volcanic rock.The moon is not like earth, instead of a hot core, the moon is completely cold and dead.It doesn’t rotate or turn around like the earth either; it faces us in one direction. One thing that the moon does do is that it has an orbit around the earth.

REASON BEHIND 

   The reason that we see the moon with a glow or shine, is because the light of the sun is reflecting off of the moon that is visible to us.Think of the moon as a mirror.In the case of the moon, it’s really a bad mirror. Due to the fact that it is made up of such dark material, it reflects only about 12% of the light that hits it.The amount of light that gets bounced back to earth also depends on the time and place of the orbit of the moon. When the moon’s orbit puts it in direct forward facing to the earth, we get a larger amount of light bounced back.

FULL MOON OR SUPER MOON

   This is when we have a ‘full moon’.It appears larger and brighter and we can usually see the man-in-the-moon face really clearly.As the orbit changes, the angle of the light changes and less and less light bounces back to earth.During the various quarter stages of the moon it is actually only reflecting around 8% of the light.

   Due to the elliptical orbit, the moon occasionally gets even closer.When this happens, and it is facing the earth, we see the moon at a 20% reflection and this is called a super moon.The light of a super moon is so bright, that astronomers have to put away their telescopes because the light hides a lot of the surrounding night sky, including the light of smaller stars.