system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5: The moon is bright enough to be seen from 240,000 miles away even in daytime, how could astronauts look directly at it during the lunar space landing?
gpt
The moon is just acting as a mirror. It is not producing it's own light.

Take a regular mirror. Turn on a bright light. Set up the mirror about ten feet from the light. Now stand about ten feet from the mirror and look at the light in the mirror. Not too bright to look at. Now get right next to the mirror, less than a foot. The light should still be about the same brightness.

Now consider that the moon is quite a bit less reflective than a mirror. It's gray dust. An interesting thing to note is that there is video from a moon landing in which an astronaut is in the shadow of the lander, and yet is fully visible. Conspiracy theorists say that this is proof of a secondary light source, a stage light. It's actually light being reflected from the surface *up* onto the astronaut.