Cosmos/Moon/Light

Moon Light

NASA's Explanation of Moon light

According to NASA, The Moon does not make its own light (moonlight) they claim the light is actually reflected sunlight. At any moment, half of the Moon is brightly sunlit (this is the day side). The other half is in the dark (this is the night side). Throughout the month, as the Moon rotates and orbits, day and night occur on different parts of its surface. The Moon takes a whole month to complete one rotation. This means that lunar day and night are each about two Earth weeks long.

Reality check

Even if you, for a moment, believe moon orbits around the earth; lit by a sun 93 million miles away, and having that light reflect down to the surface of the earth from an average of 238,855 miles away. How is it that rocks and dust on the moon can reflect light bright enough to read from at night? How come the rocks and dirt on earth don't reflect more light, considering the earth is closer to the sun at times?

Using the inverse square law of light and the heliocentric assumptions of the distance to the moon and that the moon is reflecting sunlight, you can calculate that the moon's surface would have been 1 trillion times brighter than the sun when viewed from the earth.