Albedo

I was laying in bed as she slept next to me. I was staring off into space which I recently learned I do often. This time my gaze was on the ceiling. She’s made me acutely aware I stare in a specific way when I’m thinking: eyes wide open without flexing any other muscle on my face, a calm but intense focus. It must look exceptionally weird.

I was observing the light that leaked through the curtains and how it faded to darkness as I moved my eye across the ceiling away from the window. I was thinking about the sun sending light into our solar system and how dark it must be the further away you get from the sun. I was thinking about the factors that contributed to a planet’s perceived brightness. The first: it’s proximity to the nearest star, which is easier to measure; the second is more abstract: how much it absorbs or reflects light, it’s Albedo.

Albedo is a measure of how much light a planet reflects or absorbs. 0 is perfectly dark, reflects no light; and 1 is perfectly bright, it reflects all light. Mercury is close to the sun but has a very low Albedo of 0.1-0.12 while Venus is much further from the sun but has a much higher Albedo around 0.75. But their perceived brightness to us is similar in the night sky. A planet’s perceived brightness doesn’t just have to do with how close it is to the sun, but how much it reflects that sun back into space around it. A planet can be close to the sun but still not reflect a lot of light.

She rolled over in bed and I snapped back to the wonderful reality of our lazy Sunday morning. She likes to press her face against my chest as she sleeps. It’s comforting to her to feel close and I want it that way too. My eyes are back up on the ceiling again but this time I’m not thinking about stars and solar systems, I’m thinking about her and how close we are. I’m thinking about how bright my universe feels with her. If we could measure our Albedo, what would it be?

She makes every day brighter. Sometimes it’s when she teaches me something she learned, and sometimes it’s the way she smiles after telling a joke I’ve heard a million times. She says I do the same thing. Sometimes it’s my obsession with two wheeled transportation, and sometimes it’s just a song I get to share with her.

We’re both reflecting light back to each other, but some of that light emanates from within us. We can be planets and stars at the same time. We can be a source of light and also reflect the light of others. We can fill our lives with people that share their light and reflect our light back at us.

We all possess the ability to reflect or absorb light. We all possess the ability to bring ourselves closer to our light source, whether it’s inside of us or with the community we build. We all possess the ability to become a light source for others.