Tim Riley <timothyrileyatnetscapedotnet> wrote:

>
> I had to jump in here, even though I haven't been following the discussion
> closely. The moon is illuminated by two sources: the sun and the earth. The
> reflection of sunlight off of the earth (the albedo) is why we can see the
> dark portion of the moon. The earth reflects approximately 39% of the
> sunlight that hits it (which is where the title of Vangelis' album
> "Albedo 0.39" comes from).
>

I had actually forgotten about that!  Thanks. But I seem to remember reading
somwehere that the moon's surface material is VERY dark...which would
explain why the "darK" part of the moon seems almost black, compared to
it's much brighter half-moon shape.  In other words, the dark half is
reflecting much less than 39%. Wheras, the sun is SO bright that it makes
the moon's intrinsically-dark material positively GLOW with brilliance! ;-)
So I would *assume* that the albedo isn't contributing very much to the
bright half's appearance, relatively speaking.

Ken

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