The other day I posted a personal observation I had made about the Sun. In simple words I was stating that in order to locate where the Sun lies physically would only require us to trace its light beams back to their source using basic geometry. The angles of the suns light reaching Earth were more than sufficient information to allow us to calculate how high the Sun was in our sky.

That was the smoking gun detail that it is the Sun that is circling the Earth, not the other way around.

Today I thought I would tackle another of my basic observations. These are things I have noted on my own over the years, incidentally. I have not been told these facts by anyone else and as far as I can tell nobody ever discusses them. So what has been asserted that I am challenging, is that the Moon reflects its light from the Sun. Without a Sun and its great glow we might not see the moon at all (in theory).

That assertion is plain wrong and I can prove it.

The reason I say this is because of the relative brightness of our Lunar companion. We can literally read a book by it during its fullness as it bathes the Earths surface in its night time glow. And when we look skyward we can see a moon that is evenly shining in light from one edge to another. I mean to say, there is very little difference in the brightness of the moon at its edges versus its center. All of it appears equally bright all at once. But that is not how reflected light is supposed to look when its flowing off a ball shaped satellite.

So this is about the physics of light and how much light should reach the eye of the observer when the source is different than the reflected surface that is being observed. I am going to avoid getting geeky and doing physics at this point. Its sufficient to say that light bouncing off a ball shape can never and will never appear to the viewer as an evenly reflective surface. There is always a hot spot since light bounces back perpendicular to its source whereas the rest of the light does so in gradations of diffusion and scattered rays. The image in my post makes the point easy to understand. See the bright spot?

So when you look up in the sky and see a full moon equally lit across its entire surface you are not looking at reflected light. You are looking at a ball that is actually its own light source. That is the only conclusion that can be drawn since the only other option was that the Moon is being lit by light reflecting from Earth. But of course that situation would still have to follow the same physics as the Sun being the original light source. And since the Sun is ruled out as the Moons light source we only have moon lighting to work with unless the Moon is made of plasma as some people assert.

But the Suns lighting has little or nothing to do with what you are viewing on a brightly lit moon.