Create Fake Moonlight!

Ignite your child's interest in astronomy with this simple science experiment that demonstrates the principle of luminosity and the reflection property of light. After she completes the experiment, she'll use deductive reasoning to draw a comparison between this experiment and a real-life example—the sun and moon! This experiment also helps stimulate your child's curiosity about the world around her. Once she understands how the moon shines, she'll want to investigate the science behind other everyday phenomena!

What You Need:

• Flashlight
• Bike reflector (either attached to a bike or not)
• Dark night

What You Do:

1. Turn on the flashlight.
2. Have your child shine the beam directly onto the bike reflector and observe what happens.
3. Turn the flashlight off. What happens now?
4. Ask your child why the bike reflector glowed when the flashlight was on and went dark when the flashlight was turned off. If she answers that the bike reflector lit up, ask her the following questions to help her reason out the explanation: Did the reflector need an outside force to light it up? What was the source of that light?
5. Now have your child look up into the sky and observe the moon. Ask your child how the moon relates to this experiment and where the moon's light comes from.

What Happened?

A luminous object (like the sun or the flashlight) produces its own light. A non-luminous object (like the moon or the bike reflector) can only light up by reflecting light emitted by a luminous object. The moon reflects the light from the sun just like the bike reflector reflected the light from the flashlight in the experiment.