Reply To: How does moon shine?

The moon doesn’t produce its own light. The moon shines because its surface bounces off the light from the sun. Moonlight is nothing but the sunlight that gets reflected from the surface off the old volcanoes, craters, and lava flows that are present on the moon’s surface. And even though it sometimes seems to shine very brightly, the moon reflects only 3 to 12 percent of the sunlight. The perceived brightness of the moon from Earth depends on where the moon is in its orbit around the planet thus we see different phases of the moon.