Far side of the Moon
Does the Moon have a dark side?
The Moon has a far side that mostly faces away from Earth, but it is not always dark. Both the near and far sides have day and night as sunlight falls on different parts of the Moon.
Try the question
Is the far side always dark?
Move through the phase cycle. Compare the arrow toward Earth with the arrow toward the Sun.
Watch for: Far side is a fixed hemisphere; dark side is whichever hemisphere faces away from sunlight now.
Far is about us; dark is about the Sun
“Far side” names a fixed half of the Moon — the same terrain, always turned away from Earth. “Dark side” can only honestly name a moving half: wherever it is currently night, which sweeps right around the Moon every month the same way night sweeps around Earth every day. A fixed name and a moving name can’t be the same thing, and the phases prove it: every crescent you have ever seen is sunlight spilling onto the far side.
Why one side hides at all
The Moon spins exactly once per trip around us — not by coincidence, but because Earth’s gravity braked it into step over billions of years, which is tidal locking. So one hemisphere faces us for good. Almost for good: the orbit’s slight ellipse and tilt let us peek a little around the edges — libration — so about 59% of the Moon is visible from Earth over time.
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What the far side is actually like
Different, not darker. It has almost none of the smooth dark lava plains that make the face we see look like a face — it is paler, more heavily cratered, with a thicker crust, and why the two halves differ so much is still an open question. It is also the quietest radio environment a telescope could ask for, shielded from every transmitter on Earth by 3,500 km of rock, which is why astronomers keep proposing observatories there. The first photographs came from Luna 3 in 1959; the first landing on the far side came sixty years later, in 2019.