The Moon looks white in the night sky, but its surface is closer in color to a worn asphalt road — and it appears bright enough to read by on a clear night not because the surface is bright, but because the Moon is so close and fully sunlit that even a surface reflecting just 12 percent of incoming light becomes one of the brightest objects in the sky

The Moon looks white in the night sky, sometimes silver, sometimes yellow or orange when it sits low on the horizon. The casual impression is of a bright object, possibly even of a slightly luminous one. That impression is wrong about the surface. The Moon’s average surface reflectance, the proportion of sunlight it scatters back [...] The post The Moon looks white in the night sky, but its surface is closer in color to a worn asphalt road — and it appears bright enough to read by on a clear nig