I thought I had asked this question here before, but when I did a search it didn’t come up.
If I were standing on the moon, looking at the Earth, could I ever see a reflection of the moon on the ocean?
(A book I read a number of years ago began with a description of the solar system, and had a reflection of the moon visible from the moon.)
I would think that most of the light from the moon would be reflected away from the direct path back to the moon by ocean waves.
Given a smooth ocean surface with no waves, the moon’s reflection should look like the reflection from a convex spherical mirror. There would be a small virtual image formed at a point between the surface of the ocean and what would be the focal point of a convex spherical mirror. The focal point is located half way between the surface of the mirror (the ocean surface) and the center of curvature (center of the earth).
Replace the underlined word with concave. Dammit.
You might be able to see flashes of reflection when the moon, sun and planet are all lined up. When Mars, the earth and the sun lined up back in 2001, many observers noticed bright solar reflections on the red planet:
A lunar reflection would be much dimmer of course, but perhaps visible if the planet had just gotten a fresh coat of snow.
I think you had it right the first time.
Anyway I agree, the ocean isn’t smooth enough to create a reflected image. At such large scales, the ocean’s surface acts like a frosted glass surface.
It would be a pretty small image in any case as this construction shows.
