‘how does the mirror know what’s behind the paper?!’

Fun fact, the Moon actually has a very low albedo, meaning it’s actually not all that reflective. The surface differs a bit, depending on the composition. But overall it’s quite close to a dark asphalt.

Our eyes (or more our brains) are very good at high dynamic range and discerning details. That’s why a Moon rising may look huge, bright and beautiful. But when you try and take a picture, it looks terrible.

Now this isn’t to say the moon isn’t actually bright when standing upon it. The Moon is at the same distance more or less to the Sun as the Earth and the lack of atmosphere causes the contrast to be higher. We all know standing outside on a bright day will be pretty damned bright. Even when looking at a darker surface like a road, it can be bright out. Thus we wear sunglasses, as did the astronauts, just integrated into their visors. And our eyes adjust to let in less light, as to not blind us.

And our cameras need to be set differently, to prevent the picture from being blown out. Usually automatically, but with fancy or old cameras manually. The astronauts did the same, making it very hard to estimate how bright the surface actually is. If we were to lock our camera on Earth, taking a picture of the bright Moon in the night sky. Then go to the Moon’s surface and take another picture with the same settings, the brightness would be the same. However the picture would be a pretty terrible one.

Humans are terrible at estimating things like brightness, because our eyes and brains adjust to the light level. This is required to make us better at seeing the world and thus surviving, but not as good at being scientific measuring devices. Thus we’ve used our tools to create actual scientific measuring devices and have mapped the albedo of the Moon. And wouldn’t you know it, it’s all perfectly consistent, who would have thought?

This is the thing about all these Facebook conspiracies. They are often based on actual real mismatches. Things that make you go: “Hmmm that IS weird!”. But then instead of doing the research and finding out the answer (which usually takes about 5 mins of searching), they abuse the confusion to promote their bullshit theories. Sometimes it will be just straight up lies, but sometimes it’s actually an interesting thing that lies beneath.

I’ve also noticed a lot of them can also be easily defeated when they claim stuff, that it only supports their case if it were always the case. Like for example flat earth because no plane routes that travel between certain places on the southern hemisphere. That would be a strong point for them, except 1 min of googling shows there are actually active plane routes that would be impossible on a flat earth. With live tracking available and people posting on social media getting on and off these planes. Or for example the Earth only being 6000 years old because dino bones are plastic in museums. Sure if all dino bones were plastic, that would be a strong point. But in a lot of cases there are a lot of actual bones. Augmented with plastic to show a full skeleton, where only a partial one was dug up. Which is often plainly stated next to the bones, if those idiots could read of course. Or the skull being hung at the top made from plastic, with the real actual skull in a display next to it, so people can look at it closely.

Flat earth is so dumb, it can be disproven in a billion different ways in very little time. I’m not convinced anyone actually believes that crap. They also do basically nothing to disprove the round(ish) Earth model, they just say it’s nonsense because they say it is. And invent crazy dumb shit for their own “theories” that aren’t even internally consistent.

Moon light? No… Moon heavy…

That pic on the moon looks pretty well lit to me.

I miss r/flatearth where the comments were like a 5050 if it was satire or genuinely someone from Facebook believing it

I think I’m not smart enough to understand this

Earthlight?