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American education system in action everybody
(thelemmy.club)
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this post was submitted on 23 Jul 2026
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Moonlight and starlight is indirect and distant solar power, respectively.
Could also be as simple as them using the wrong cutoff time for when the Sun goes down
That light has way less than 1% of the intensity of sunlight.
Edit: from here you get that the brightness of moonlight is 0.05 - 0.3 lux whilst that of direct sunlight is 32,000–100,000 lux
Our eyes deceive us (our pupils dilate or contract and we have different more sensitive cells in our retina for seeing in low light conditions) and make it seem brighter than it actually is whilst making sunshine during the day seem less bright than it actually is.
You can use any light of the right frequencies on a solar panel to produce electricity, but the amount of current you can get on a solar panel from moonlight and starlight is minuscule.
My bet is that the 1% comes from things like molten salt solar power plants which during the day use sunlight to heat up some kind of salt (which is used to produce steam that powers a steam turbine), some of which will only be used to actually generate power during the night.
If it's not from the sun, it's not sunlight. Moonlight doesnt have heat, so it cant produce electricity
Moonlight is from the sun, and "has heat" in as much of a sense as sunlight does. Do you think solar panels can tell whether light is coming from the sun, moon, a distant star, or a flashlight? They just turn the photons into electricity, it doesn't care where they're from.
Have you ever been warmed by moonlight? It doesn't give energy.
Yes, I have. It's less energy than comes straight from the sun, but it still carries energy, because it's all just photons. The photons from the sun aren't hotter than the ones reflected from the moon, there's just more of them.
Some photons are hotter than others. Its the wavelengths and frequencies. No UV from moonlight
You are fascinating. I mean yes, individual photons carry different amounts of energy and that's reflected in their wavelength, but how do you know that and not how reflection works? Moonlight contains a similar proportion of UV to sunlight, there's just less total light.
At best, somewhere around one quarter of a percent as much light. It seems to crazy to think something that looks as bright as it does is such a tiny fraction of what the sun puts out. It seems obvious that you aren't going to notice the heating of moonlight on your face the same way you notice the heating of sunlight on your face when you realize how much different the scale is.
I am surprised / impressed that the solar panels are apparently collecting 3 times that much at night (and that is assuming it even was a full moon whenever this infographic was referring to). I wonder how much of that is stars or if it is basically just re-collecting a bit of light pollution from nearby population centers.
Emission spectrum from the sun peaks at under 500nm corresponding to >5800K. Emission spectrum from the moon peaks at 600nm, corresponding to <4100K. Moonlight is objectively colder and therefore gives less energy. Reflection does not necessarily preserve spectral characteristics.
https://nvlpubs.nist.gov/nistpubs/jres/118/jres.118.020.pdf
https://earth.gsfc.nasa.gov/climate/projects/solar-irradiance/science
You could have just claimed that from that start instead of the black and white "doesn't have heat", "doesn't give energy".
Less funny though
So what I'm hearing is that moonlight does have energy and UV radiation and can generate electricity. Thanks for agreeing with me.
My friend I am taking the piss
Sorry bud, the deadline for that excuse was 3 or 4 comments ago. You're stoopid.
Touched a nerve did I?
Don't quit your day job.
Hi
Emission spectra are Schwartzkopf radiation, thats hardly relevant for the moon, whose main source of radiation is reflection. For visible light its easy, else the moon would always be full. Infrared is lower frequency and thus lower energy. UV reflection should be the only consideration.
Wavelengths and frequencies are the same thing, just inverted. E=hf/c. Ask ya boy, Albert
It's a subset of the wavelengths of sunlight, specifically just those which add up to the color of the moon.
The problem is not the "quality" of the light, it's the quantity: moonlight has way less brightness than sunlight, specifically from here you get that the brightness of moonlight is 0.05 - 0.3 lux whilst that of direct sunlight is 32,000–100,000 lux.
Less brightness pretty much directly translates to less power produced by a solar panel.
So you can actually generate power in a solar panel from moonlight (photons of the same color have the same wavelength hence the same amount of energy, so are equally capable of inducing electron release independently of how those photons got there), it's just a ridiculously small amount compared to how much you can generate under its optimal operating conditions (under direct sunlight) because moonlight is made up of far fewer photons than direct sunlight.
Huh? Everything that moves has or can create heat. Heat from light is the energy it has being transformed when it hits an atom. So all light, even a single photon, creates heat when absorbed. Just a matter of how much.
Light that can't produce heat doesn't exist, and matter without heat would be at absolute zero, and that is impossible in our current physics model.
Even the heat death of the universe has a static temperature above 0.