(Note: They do have their own website, www.moonvertising.com, but it isn’t very good. It doesn’t really give you a top down presentation, but just talks about a campaign for Rolling Rock beer.)
With that out of the way, I would think I was being whooshed, except that I recently drove by a billboard urging me to look at the next full moon. Apparently, the plan is to use a laser to project advertising on the moon’s face, this time for Rolling Rock beer. Although, come to think of it, there’s no reason they couldn’t have alternating ads for different clients, the way they do on those Clear Channel Diamond Vision billboards that have been cropping up like weeds in the last few months.
Is Moonvertising really possible? Will the advertisement be visible to anyone who can see the moon in the night sky? And moreover, isn’t this the most crass piece of commercialism to have appeared in a long while?
Let’s say it is. They could project a message on the Moon’s surface. You wouldn’t be able to clearly see it without a telescope. The Moon is as large in your view as half your smallest fingernail held at arm’s length.
That’s the whole Moon. The usable surface if it for this purpose–the part that faces the Earth closely enough to reflect an image–is maybe half of this.
If an image were feasible, it would have to be a very simple one, like the Volkswagen logo and no info about any of their products. VW has better, cheaper venues for advertising.
No. You need way to much power to light up the moon. Sunlight is about 1000 Watts per meter squared. say 10% of that is visible (I think more than 10% is visible). The moon is about 1.9 * 10^13 meters squared in cross section so you need around 1.9 * 10^15 Watts to light up the moon with advertising. You might be able to get by with 1/10 th that if you put the advertising on a new moon.
The total US generating capacity is around 10^12 Watts.
I remember a Sunday newspaper strip where Superman carved the moon to look like a giant face enjoying a hotdog, in order to get money for a charity from the hotdog manufacturer.
You’d actually need more power then. A new moon is only above the horizon during the day. The moon is pretty inconspicuous during the day even when part of it is lit by the sun. Most people have noticed the moon in the sky at night, but a lot of people don’t realize that the moon is also sometimes visible during the day. A new moon would also appear very near the sun in the daytime sky, which means your ad is going to be even less conspicuous.
There’s another problem- the atmosphere. It’s going to dim your light and mean you’ll require more power. But worse than that, it’s going to distort and blur your image in fairly unpredictable ways. It will look like a slide on an overhead projector with a clear glass pan of water on top (for those of us over a certain age).
Not to mention the safety issues involved. You can supposedly cause problems (and get a visit from the authorities) by pointing a green laser pointer at an airplane. Any green laser pointer you can buy has an output of less than 5 milliwatts (10[sup]-3[/sup] watts). The folks who shoot laser beams into the air for adaptive optics (at least the ones at Lick Observatory near San Jose) use about a 10 watt laser, and they have to keep a lookout for any planes getting near their beam (and turn it off if the spotter sees any). What do you think would happen if someone shone a 10[sup]15[/sup] watt laser into the air, and a plane flew through it? (Somebody call Mythbusters…) The advertisers probably wouldn’t like it if their ad on the moon blinked on and off periodically, as it might have to for the safety of planes and satellites.
Someone with 20/40 vision can distinguish 10-arcminute tall characters (cite). The Moon is 30 arcminutes in diameter, so you can fit 3 lines of text there and it’d still be legible with the naked eye.
So size is not really a problem. The power requirement is. Even if you project the ad onto the dark side of the crescent moon, the illuminated characters are still right next to the bright crescent, lit by full sunlight. The illumination must be comparable to full sunlight to be visible. See gazpacho’s calculation above (though I think even that is optimistic - an ad needs more than 10% coverage, I think.)
I’m pretty sure it would be far more technically feasible to project an image on the moon by building a shadow puppet and casting a shadow when the moon is full.
A shadow puppet about the size of Australia should do it - so when I say “far more technically feasible”, although I mean it, I also mean “not feasible at all”.
Even if this were technically feasible, your ad would be upside down for some of your viewers. If it appears right side up in North America and Europe, it’s going to be upside down for viewers in Australia.
If you project the ad onto the dark side of a crescent moon, say 3-4 days after new moon, then the only place you can see the ad from is the small longitude range from which the sun has just set, but the moon is still above the horizon. Almost all the people in that area would agree which side of the moon is “up,” to within +/- 60 degrees or so. (Because at any given longitude, “almost all” the population at that longitude is confied to a 120-degree range in latitude.)
Technologically, they could do that, but they would be sued by a lot of people, so they simply don’t do it.
There’s the Outer Space Treaty, to which all spacefaring nations are parties. It stipulates that the moon may only be used “for peaceful purposes” (Article IV), which I guess also includes advertising.
One could even argue that this treaty is binding only on the states which are parties to it, not private individuals or corporations. Either way, there doesn’t seem to be anything illegal about it.
