Brighten the nights with the moon?

[Commander Kinsey]

If we covered the moon in aluminium foil, how much brighter would our nights be?

[williamwright]

Nine times brighter.

Bill

[Bev]

Does that not depend on whether you use the shinier side or the duller side of the foil? I understand that a Mr P Floyd tried the experiment but foolishly he only covered the dark side of the moon.

[Martin Brown]

It is the wrong choice though. If you covered the moon in nice shiny aluminium foil only the parts that reflected sunlight at the Earth will be visibly bright. The rest of the moon will be reflecting mostly dark sky at us - plus a bit of Earth shine. The latter is often clearly visible when the moon is a thin crescent after sunset or before sunrise.

It might even result in making it a fair bit dimmer. In the ideal case of a perfect sphere it certainly would be much dimmer. Xmas treat: try shining a torch at a metallic bauble vs a white one to see what I mean.

Painting it white would work much better and the answer is about 9x brighter. Basically the moon is mostly basalt (ie. tarmac coloured).

[Andrew]

If nobody looked at the moon, would it be there ?

[nightjar]

Do we actually have a moon? The big bright thing up in the sky is big enough to make it and earth a binary system.

[Tim Streater]

Their common centre of mass is well within the Earth.

[Brian Gaff (Sofa]

Well, how much would that cost to achieve though? There are serious crags and mountains on the moon, and remember you probably only need the side facing us covered its true. but its a convex area, and hence you would have different lighting dependent on the phases of the moon. Not very practical, or consistent.

I thought the idea was to put a Venetian blind between us and the sun to control the earths temperature. There is a spot in a resonance with the orbit that this could be done of course but the size would be huge and hence the forces on it even from the solar wind would be an issue.

Brian

[Commander Kinsey]

Don't give up the day job.

[newshound]

You mean the L1 Lagrange point; on the sunward side, while the James Webb telescope is heading for the L2. It's about four times as far away as the moon, so a moon sized reflector there could deflect about 1/16 of the solar output. We'd need an astronomer to tell us the solar and radiation forces on that. Presumably if it was heavy enough, the gravitational dynamics would keep it stably in position.

[Commander Kinsey]

Well that's educated me, I didn't realise it kept *exactly* in synch to face us with the same side all the time, but it does due to something called synchronous rotation, a "tidal lock". Haven't read enough to explain it. Odd name, since the moon doesn't have a sea to have a tide.

There's a surplus of aluminium foil, it wraps all the Mr Kipling cakes for example.

Somebody somewhere told me painting it white would be better, so the light wasn't bounced off all at the wrong angle.

We don't need our temperature reduced. But funnily enough I was just watching something about the Webb telescope, sent on the 21st of December into a very high orbit involving the sun's and earth's gravity, to pick up infra red from the beginnings of the universe, which was ultra violet but has stretched. They need to shield it from infra red from the sun, the earth, and the moon, so have installed a 5 layer shield above it, looking like a sort of tent awning. It has an SPF (as in the factor of sun lotion) of 750,000.

[Commander Kinsey]

If you dug down to that point, would weird shit happen?

[Commander Kinsey]

Schroedinger's cat was misunderstood.

[Commander Kinsey]

Cats are not masters, they're morons.

[Commander Kinsey]

You called me a boy. Are you imagining a young naked thing?

[Commander Kinsey]

They're not even aware of their own tail.

Try putting an unopened can of food in front of them, they get so confused.

[Commander Kinsey]

You deleted the insult, try again.