Why Does The Moon Shine?

Since those ancient days when moon was worshiped, man has learned a great deal about the moon, and now, at last, human beings have landed there and explored parts of its cratered surface thus solving man of its mysteries.

But there is no mystery at all as to why the moon shines. It is a satellite of the earth. That is, it is a small body that revolves around it, just as the earth revolves around the sun.

The only reason we can see the moon from earth, or that it "shines", is because light from the sun strikes its surface and is reflected to us. Strangely enough, we can only see one side of the moon from the earth. This is because the moon rotates on its axis in the same length of time it takes for it to make its journey around the earth. Of course, man has seen the other side from television pictures sent back by the various Apollo crews as they orbited the moon.

Since the moon has no atmosphere, or air, the light from the sun which hits it has rather interesting effects. For about 14 days, the surface of the moon is heated by the direct rays of the sun to a temperature above that of boiling water. The other half of the lunar month, it is exposed to the cold of a long, dark night, because there is no air to stop the heat from the sun radiating away again. The earth does reflect light back on to the moon (this is called "earthshine") but it does little to help raise the temperature of the lunar night which can fall to about 200 degrees Centigrade!

Scientists, examining moon material brought back to earth by the astronauts, have found that as much as 50 percent of the moon's "soil" is made up of glass. This glass is in different shapes. Some of it is perfectly round, elliptical, teardrop-shaped, or dumbbell-shaped. Also the glass ranges in size from tiny specks up to beads a millimeter (about 1/25 inch) in size.
The surfaces of these glass beads are very smooth. When a light is shined on them they are extremely lustrous. Dr. Wernher von Braun, prominent in United States spaceflight programs, wrote of them as "glistening in sunlight like light-reflecting glass beads in a highway sign." While most of this glass is colorless, some of it is brown, yellow, red or green.
Even the moon's rocks show that they were made to reflect light, for they are pitted with small glass-lined hollows. Some of them are covered with spattered drops of glass and appear as if they were glazed.
Further, in their moon walk, at the bottom of small craters the astronauts found glinting spangles in the form of glazed spots resembling splashes of molten solder. These were on rocks and on the soil.

It's getting light from the sun.... *sigh*

Moonlight  is actually reflected sunlight.