Sunday 17 October 2010

apparent magnitude - Why do dark objects look white from a distance? (Moon, Ceres, but not Earth!)

The photo in your question is -- well, not exactly fake, but a composite. The biggest clue is that Earth is too close to the horizon; it would have had to be taken from within a few degrees of the boundary between the near and far sides of the Moon, and none of the Apollo missions landed there.



Furthermore, take a close look at the cloud patterns. The view of Earth appears to be identical to that in famous Earthrise photo taken from lunar orbit by Apollo 8 (click to see a larger version):



Earthrise



As you can see in that photo, the surface of the Moon is considerably darker than the Earth.



In the photo in the question, ignoring the inserted image of the Earth, the sunlit surface of the Moon is the brightest thing in the photo. The light balance must have been adjusted to make everything in the image easy to see.



As for why the Moon looks white in the night sky, it has an albedo of about 0.37, whereas the night sky has an albedo of about 0.00. Human eyes are very good at adapting to varying lighting conditions. When you look at a dark object against an even darker background, it's going to look white or light gray, even if it's intrinsically dark gray.

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