The best I've got is the photo analysis, and we've agreed that's pretty one-sided.
Maybe we could estimate the brightness of the dim side and calculate what we think the albedo of the Earth is. Maybe we could do a spectral analysis to see what frequencies of light we're seeing. Maybe that could help us determine where the light is coming from.
We could accept evidence from the Chinese space agency, the Russians, or the Americans. All 3 claim to have been there and taken photos. I guess those are out though.
Super open to other ideas.
Someone could write a letter to someone who teaches an optics class, astronomy class, astrophysics class, etc. I'm sure they could come up with a home made experiment or test we could do to attempt to determine where the light from the "unlit" side of the moon is most likely originating from.
I forgot JRowe's opinion. (TBH I dismissed it already.) If you want to look at it, that one is super easy to create a test for. Just compare images from different phases.
Why did you dismiss his opinion? We tried comparing images and one some of the points he made i agreed. On most of the points he made I didn't agree. I have not dismissed his opinion. I am very curious about it.
Ok let's go through it again. As I understand it, JRowe argued that the features of the moon (craters, etc) are NOT all pointing at us in the same way while the lit crescent moves across that face. We took photos and compared them. It was extremely clear and incontrovertible to me that the features of the moon remained pointed towards us while the lit crescent moved over them. If there was something I missed, I'm happy to look at it again. Please present anything to contradict my conclusion. To be entirely honest, once that was shown and JRowe continued to insist that the features didn't line up, I stopped reading his argument. So it's entirely plausible that I've missed something. I'll admit fault and agree to look again if you have something.
So of the testable claims: "self-illuminated" vs "lit by the sun" I don't see any way around it. Unless somebody has any other evidence, all we have points to a clear winner. I think we should move on to looking at Tom's idea of bendy light.
There are many claims here it's not just self illuminated and lit by the sun. There were other claims too like the moon is lit by "earthshine" Now there is a claim that either the Earth is generating light (I assume either internally, man made, or through reflected light from the sun). It was my claim that the moon is lit by the sun and some other unknown light source.
Looking at a picture and disagree with what hypothesis the observations support does not equal a clear winner IMO.
1. your observation was that the moon is clearly lit from a very bright celestial body.
2. jrows observation was that the moon is clearly self lit and rotating.
3. My observation was that the moon appears to possibly be lit from a very bright celestial body and also either generating it's own light or being lit from a second light source.
I'm not trying to win any particular point. I want to remain carefully objective. I'm trying very hard to help the FE side come up with something viable.
On 1. above: The photos of the moon show what appears to be shadows behind craters. This is not disputed. (Is it?) This makes that an objective conclusion. There
appear to be shadows cast by the craters. This is strong evidence for the externally lit hypothesis and is evidence against the self-lit hypothesis. Not biased and not a conclusion. This is evidence, and I don't think it's in dispute. (Although I make that mistake often, so correct me please.)
Another interesting observation is that the unlit portion of the moon emits some light too. This observation has multiple explanations. We've discussed possible ways to tease more data out of this, but so far, this one is a wash.
Finally, I noted that the moon is opaque. (Didn't show it, but we could test this if you want.) This rules out the hologram hypothesis but leaves the externally lit and self-lit hypothesis workable.
I summarize this all to say the only evidence we have here so far only matches the externally lit hypothesis. More evidence and further exploration of what we have is welcome.
On 2. above: JRowe made some claim that the moon is self-illuminated. Was any evidence put forth to back this up? As I've said, I didn't see what it was, so bring it forth, and I agree to consider it.
On 3. above: Yeah I can't see any way to rule out that both could be true. The moon could be partially self-lit and also partially externally lit. There is a thread of logic that follows this point that I'd rather not go down just yet. For now, I'd like to focus on whether or not we can rule out the externally lit hypothesis - be it in addition to self-lit or without.