You could start a fire from the light of a single star if you had a big enough lens. You could also start a fire with the light from a hand mirror at the distance of the moon if it reflected the sun's light at you. But you'd need a very big lens.
You could start a fire from the light of a single star if you had a big enough lens. You could also start a fire with the light from a hand mirror at the distance of the moon if it reflected the sun's light at you. But you'd need a very big lens.
That's my impression as well. A blackbody has albedo 0. The moon has an albedo of around 0.12. While I suspect you can't start a fire from moonlight in practice, I don't think the arguments in this article are correct.
I guess if you're reading that as some kind of absolutely logical argument. I read stuff like that as an abstraction which just kinda works in the messy real world. Pretty much like how the typical explanation for how a wing works turns out to be an over-simplification. It only partly works that way. Actual wings are complicated, but in the aggregate, they just get enough air molecules to go downward to net out the forces to keep the plane from going downward. It turns out that there are a lot of mechanisms contributing to this all at once. (Which is something else he discusses in that series.)
Ivanpah may be able to, I wonder if we can borrow it at night for an experiment - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivanpah_Solar_Power_Facility
edit - And by whom. Should probably get it in early, just in case.
It's mostly not reflected. It's mostly scattered. If it were specularly reflected, there would be a bright spot on the moon (where you could see the reflection of the sun), and you'd be able to concertate light from that to light a fire.
The only reason the moon's surface doesn't reach such high temperatures is that the moon's surface is not thermally isolated from the rest of the night sky or from the body of the moon itself (which is also not isolated from the night sky).