Originally published at: The Moon in 174 Megapixels: Clear enough to see all the animal kingdom, not just the proverbial rabbit | Boing Boing
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Academically I’ve long known that the lunar surface is mostly dark gray with a little brown mixed in but intuitively it’s always hard to get past the “moon is a glowing off-white orb” thing.
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I remember when I was in a class and we were studying reflectivity, or albedo- measured on a scale from 0, unreflective, to 1, perfectly reflective. The moon has an average albedo of .12 to .15, and that means it reflects 12% of the light that hits it. I remember being a bit shocked that it was so unreflective, yet seemed so bright.
I still love sitting behind a scope from time to time to look at the moon, providing no real scientific insight, but instead reminding me that I am small, the sun is bright and dangerous, and countess others have looked up at that spheroid and thought the same.
FYI Venus has an albedo of .75, Saturn .35, and Enceladus, a moon of Saturn, an albedo of 0 .99 (Source, see first link above).
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and?
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Sorry, fact checking while taking care of the kids. I don’t trust my own memory these days, plus, I do try to provide sources. I accidentally hit “Reply” and then had to pause to make a snack for my critters.
Edit to add: I see how a partial post would reflect poorly on me.
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Most softish hard cheeses (Swiss, Gouda etc.) have an albedo of .12 to .15 as well.
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Swiss cheese has an interesting albedo calculation I’d imagine. Do you count the area occupied by holes or not?
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The moon is made of cheese so I assume that is taken into account, yes.
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For the moon as a whole, sure. But a piece of Emmentaler in your fridge would yield a different figure.
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Sure, that makes sense, but isn’t the light off when you close the door?
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Swiss cheese IS moon cheese!
Same index.
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Im pretty sure that early lunar exploreres determined that the moon is Wensleydale.
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Hmmm? And why are we sending up another rocket?
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Anyone got a direct link to a zoom able image? Cuz right now I’m limited by the resolution of my iPhone and that megapixel count means nothing. Ha.
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Perhaps you can zoom in via the reddit post?
Of course, when you zoom in you’ll see why this commenter on Ars Technica was less than impressed.
It might have been neat to have all 200k photos as a Maps app instead.
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