what is nearer to the earth the sun or the moon?
931063
Of course the Moon is closer than the Sun.\n\nThe average distance from the earth to the sun, the semimajor axis of its orbit, is 149,597,890 km.\n\nMoon's orbit is elliptical: its average orbital radius is 384401 km, apogee (farthest distance from the Earth) is 406700 km, and perigee (distance of closest approach to the Earth) is 356400 km.
438648
The Moon has a surface area of 152 million square kilometers.\nThe Earth is 13.5 times larger.
119949
solar=sun\nlunar=moon
861683
The Earth's orbit is slightly elliptical.  When it is closest to the Sun it is a distance of 91.4 million miles.  At it's furthest it is 94.5m miles.  The distance between the Earth and the Sun is also known as 1AU (astronomical unit).
175236
Mercury is close to the sun. It is visible only when the sun is below the horizon. It is seen either before sun rise  or after sun set.\n Venus is the second closest to the sun and closest to earth. Some times it is seen as morning star and some times as evening star. Sme times it is seen 4 hours before sun rise and 4 hours after sun set
126629
It appears as a 3/4 moon.  It helps to make a drawing to visualize this.  The distance from earth to moon is a very small fraction of the distance from either earth or moon to the sun, so it's fair to approximate the light rays hitting earth and moon as parallel.  First, place the moon such that the earth-moon line is at 90 degrees to the earth-sun line.  In this setup we on earth who can see the moon at all see a half moon and moonlings who can see earth see a half earth.  Next move the moon further away from the sun so the earth-moon line is at 45 degrees to the earth-sun line.  Now the moon sees only 1/4 of the sunlit part of earth, a crescent.  (This is the situation described in the question.)  From earth, however, we see 3/4 of the sunlit part of the moon.  Whether the moon phase is waxing or waning depends on which "side" of the sun-earth-sun line the moon is on relative to the moon's earth-orbital rotation direction.
198141
The moon is closest at about 1/4 million miles, the sun is next, about 93 million miles, and the nearest star is Proxima Centauri, about 4 light years (3,800,000,000,000,000,000 miles)
966904
The apogee is the point in the moon's orbit where it is the furthest from Earth; the perigee is it's closest point.
32702
CLOSEST?? to the sun?\nThat would be Mercury....
189425
It's about 93 million miles. It takes a sunbeam about eight minutes to reach earth once it leaves the sun. The moon, by contrast, is about 240,000 miles away, but I'm not positive about that exact number. I am positive about the sun, though.
1138031
Earth shine is the correct answer. When the Moon is crescent as seen from Earth, the Earth is nearly full as seen from the Moon. And Earth is bigger and has much higher reflectivity than the Moon, so a nearly full Earth gives much more light than a nearly full Moon does.
1027317
You mean the moon and the sun, which is true\nsometimes, but there are also eclipses where\nthe moon is smaller than the sun, so a small\nring of light is left uncovered (called an annular\neclipse)...\n\nBy a stroke of amazing coincidence, both the\nmoon and the sun are approx 108 times as\nfar from the earth as their diameter, so they\nappear the same size in the sky... 108 is a\nmystic number in spirituality, so I doubt if this\nis really a coincidence!
1112620
Earth.  But one of them is not a true moon.  It's only a temporary one.
37400
Okay, first of all, the moon nor the sun are planets.  The first answer should sum it up.
26830
The Earth is closest to the Sun on about 4 January of each year... Winter in the Northern Hemisphere\n\nMistWing SilverTail
299559
As the Moon moves along its orbit around the Earth its hemisphere toward the sun is fully illuminated.\n\nBut from the Earth we see only the hemisphere that is turned toward us.\n\nThat is, we are not seeing that hemisphere which is fully illuminated by the Sun.\n\nThat is why we see different shapes which are called phases of the moon.\n\nIn new moon day, the moon is in between Sun and Earth, and the moon’s non illuminated hemisphere is toward Earth and in the back ground of Sun’s bright light, the moon is invisible.\n\nWhen Moon is at 90 degree from the Sun, half of the illuminated hemisphere of Moon is visible from Earth. \n \nWhen Moon is at 180 degree from the Sun, full of the illuminated hemisphere of Moon is visible from Earth. We call it as Full Moon.
1182323
The average Earth-Moon distance is about 385,000 km.  Remember, the average is important because the moon rotates around the Earth in an eliptical fashion, which means that there are times when the moon is closer to the Earth than others depending on the point in its rotation.