Vroomfundel wrote:Quilbert wrote:One interesting question is, what would the Earth look like from the dark side of the moon at stage 2 (green 1W lase pointers)? Half of it (Asia, that is) would obviously be lit by the sun and have its usual blue-green appearance, but on the dark side of the Earth, you would see Africa and Europe glowing in green! Actually, Asia would also be a little greener than usual. Anyone up for an artist’s impression?
Apologies if I'm mistaking a slip of the tongue (fingers?) for uninformedness of astronomic terms, but the dark side of the moon is the one not facing earth - that's why is dark, it does get sunshine - we just don't see it; a remnant of a geocentric vocabulary.
From the side of the moon that's not iluminated by the sun the earth should appear pretty solid green - we're giving off half a lux with the lasers, and full moon on earth is about 0.27 lux. Agreed that it's going to be an interesting sight but I'm not the right person to that - my drawing skills are limited to a Mohammed stick figure (in an effort to inspire one person in each country to produce something crude to offend him, ridiculing the fundamentalists and distributing the damage done to embassies, reducing it to a manageable level).
Wow, that would be a pretty strange naming convention … Actually, Wikipedia says:
[cite]The dark side of the Moon can refer to:
- the lunar hemisphere that is not lit by the sun at any particular moment in time, or
- the far side of the Moon that is permanently turned away from the Earth (although it receives approximately the same amount of light as the near side of the moon)
and:
[cite]The far side of the Moon, sometimes called the "dark side of the Moon" in the sense that it is in a radio blackout in respect to transmitters on Earth,[1][2] is the lunar hemisphere that is permanently turned away, and not visible from the surface of the Earth.[/cite]
But I don’t really care … I take it that your 0.27 lux are probably more correct than the 1 lux in the what-if. But we’d have to take into account that the Earth is bigger than the Moon, has a different albedo, and is only half lit in this scenario. Also, the Earth’s population is not nearly evenly distributed …