Laser + Moon = Fake

While on vacation a relative of mine was some what excited about a certain beer company and their viral advertising. Apparently they claim that on the 21 (Full Moon) they will be shooting a laser projector at the moon and displaying their logo. I am not very convinced. Also I will not mention the company, because I do not drink beer, nor am I going to support their fake sounding viral advertising campaign.

First of all I had not even heard of this stunt, which most of the gadget blogs that I read would have had this covered. The shooting down of the satellite is a good example. Also there where some other things that just did not add up, after doing some research I came up with some interesting facts that seem to say that this is fake.

It is not unheard of to shoot a laser at the moon, it is how we get a actuate distance, however...
"They beam the laser out through a large (5 meter class) telescope, and look for the reflection in that same telescope. By sending the beam out through the telescope, you get a much tighter beam than you would from just the raw laser, and the large telescope gathers 700 thousand times as much light as your eyeball would, making it much easier to see the reflection. (5 m vs. 6 mm squared = 700,000. A fully dilated human pupil is about 6 mm IIRC.) <-Full Page" That alone makes this impossible, however what makes it worse is that they chose a full moon. Looks great, but the laser would not be nearly powerful enough to be visible over the raw sunlight bouncing off. A new moon would be much more realistic.

Oh well, I will be looking up to see if there is something on the moon, but I highly doubt that I will see anything. I guess they could still try, at least then it would not be fake, just an example of poorly thought out design,

UPDATE: After seeing nothing last night, and looking online it looks like this was indeed fake. "The Boston Globe assures us this is a hoax. From the short article: To repeat: This is viral advertising; the company isn't actually going to project a laser beam 237,000 miles into space."

There you have it, a good example of poor and arguably FALSE advertising.