Explorations

This is about the coolest thing ever, and as a side-effect makes visible something I’d known academically: the moon’s surface is actually very dark. The usual gee-whiz statement is that with an albedo of around 7 percent, the Moon is really “as dark as a blacktop parking lot.” While true, this is a little misleading. What is true, though, is that the Earth’s albedo, at something over 30 percent, is way higher than the Moon’s, and you can see that easily here.