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Reflect Orbital sells sunlight at night, but don't trust that fancy video (mashable.com)

submitted 6 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/19090299

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[–] mindbleach 1 points 6 months ago

I keep vacillating on whether this makes any damn sense.

Here's the ISS transiting the moon, or possibly some lost footage from A New Hope. Just measuring that JPG, the moon's about 600px in diameter and the ISS is charitably 100 pixels, so it's like 1/3000th the scale, from Earth's perspective. Well - the moon is 400,000 times fainter than the sun.

The sun and the moon are roughly the same size, from Earth's perspective. So there's some arrangement where, from any point you can see an ISS-sized mirror in front of the moon, it'd be reflecting the sun. The moon's about a thousand times further from Earth than the ISS, and has a diameter of 3400 km, so if you draw those two triangles touching at the ISS, the lit-up area on Earth should be about 3.4 km in diameter.

It'd be one hundred times brighter than the full moon, but still one thousand times dimmer than daylight.

Huh.