Again you are "explaining" when you should be asking. > None of the fibers would "look at the moon". Fiber isnt the same as lenses. I think you meant to ask "

Again you are "explaining" when you should be asking. > None of the fibers would "look at the moon". Fiber isnt the same as lenses. I think you meant to ask "how is a fiber different from a lens?" instead of asserting "fiber isn't the same as lenses," which turns out to be completely wrong. To a physicist, a lens is a shaped piece of refractive medium-- that is exactly what a fiber is. There is no magic inside the fiber; it does not add any photons. You are looking through a shaped piece glass, through which you will see a (possibly very distorted) image of what's on the other side. In this case, it's the moon that is on the other side. The most you could do is surround your match/ant/whatever with fibers/lenses which are showing the moon on the other side of them. And from this fact it is unavoidable that you cannot make your surrounded subject hotter than the surface of the moon. If you are trying to say anything to the contrary, I'm sorry, but you are Flat Wrong. Any other configuration of fiber would give you less moonlight than completely surrounding the subject, so it's not going to improve the odds of starting a fire. > Note too that i said match. Getting tiny bit of a matchhead hot enough to decompose isnt the same as burning an ant. I think you meant to ask "does the material or shape change anything?" instead of asserting "it isn't the same," which again, in the context of this question, turns out to be completely wrong. The maxiumum temperature that can be imparted by a lens/mirror system doesn't depend on what it's focused on at all. In the long run, the ant/match/whatever will reach that maximum temperature and not get hotter. From a thermodynamics perspective, it is like putting an object in an oven of a particular temperature-- It doesn't matter if you put in a brick, or a cake, or match, or an ant; eventually they will all be 250 degrees if the oven is set to 250 degrees. In this case, the "oven" is the moon, and it's set to about 120C. A match combusts at about 600C. There will be no combusting of the match by putting it in the moon-oven. Sorry. End of story. And if I can give some advice: If what you're hearing doesn't make sense to you, it is always safer to ask a question than to blindly assert your gut-guess of how you think it is. Someone who thinks they're an expert but spouts nonsense looks like a fool. Someone who asks a question, though, looks curious, which is smart. These two people have the same degree of knowledge, but one comes off looking much worse than the other. That's why asking questions is better, especially when you don't know the knowledge of the people who are listening.