Sandra Clay, age 11, of Phoenix, Arizona, question:
How does sunlight differ from moonlight?
The full moon looks to us about the same size as the sun. Yet the
thou h it does'nt look so much bigger diameter of the sun is 400 times bigger/for a very good reason, It is about 400 times further away from us.
Even so, you cannot look directly at the face of the blazing sun no sensible person would try it. You can stare at the patches of light and shade that make a face on the full moon as long as you wish. The sun is a blazing atomic furnace. The moon is a little mirror which reflects a small amount of the sun's light to the earth.
The moon is not even a very good reflector. Its surface is dusty with grit and ashes, A full moon reflects us only 7% of the total sunshine poured on it by the sun. This is enough to bathe our world in pale, ghostly moonlight. It is very slight when compared to the light of day from the radiant sun.
We would need 465,000 full moons to equal the light from the sun. There is not room for that many full moons in our sky. We would need several sky fulls of full moons jam paeked together, Even all this moon light would not warm the earth.
The radiant sun sends us heat across over 93 million mikes of space, It also heats the moon to a daytime temperature of over 200 degrees Fahrenheit. Little or none of the moon's heat reaches the earth. In fact, the moon is very wasteful of its heat. Temperatures there drop way below zero after the sun sets. For the moon has no atmosphere to hold onto the sun's heat from one long moonday to the next.
Comparing sunlight and moonlight is rather like comparing an erupting volcano with a tin can, At certain angles, the tin can will reflect the volcanic fury a long distance. The great sun is the only light giver in the Solar System. And it is immense, Of the entire bulk, the sun has over ninty nine and a half percent of all the matter in the Solar System.
The diameter of giant Jupiter is 11 times that of the earth, There is room for a million earths to rattle around inside the sun, And the moon's diameter is only one quarter of the earth’s. The little planets, comets, moons and asteroids can only reflect the glory of the sun back and forth to each other,
The sun’s radiant energy pours forth day and night. It can be calculated in weight. Imagine a 60 watt bulb that could burn for a million years. It would have given off three quarters of an ounce of radiant energy. The sun broadcasts four million tons of radiant energy every second. Only about two billionths of this reaches the earth, Much less reaches the moon. And the stingy moon reflects less than ten percent of its light to the earth.