Both the far side and near side of the Moon receive sunlight during a month. Still, Pink Floyd fans may be cheered to know that there are parts of the Moon that never see the Sun. There is a dark side of the Moon. The Moon’s axis has a tilt of 1.5º which causes the bottoms of some craters to be in permanent shadow.
This picture was assembled from images taken during summertime in the Moon’s southern hemisphere by the Advanced Moon Imaging Experiment on ESA’s SMART-1 spacecraft and shows a crater-riddled region around the lunar south pole. It is made up of around 40 individual images taken between December 2005 and March 2006, and covers an area of about 500 x 150 km.
Image Credit: ESA
A telescope in orbit around Mars took this view of Earth and its Moon, showing continent-size detail on the planet. The image combines two separate exposures taken in November, 2016, by the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. The images were taken to calibrate HiRISE using the known value of reflectance for the Earth-facing side of the Moon. The exposures used to make this composite image were processed separately to optimize detail visible on both Earth and the Moon. The Moon is much darker than Earth and would barely be visible if shown at the same brightness scale as Earth.
One of the cameras aboard the Artemis 1 spacecraft grabbed this picture of the Ocean of Storms (the largest dark spot on the Moon) during the lunar flyby on 5 December.
This picture was taken from the live feed from a camera aboard the Artemis I mission just before the spacecraft went behind the Moon.
That’s the first quarter moon behind The SpaceX Dragon Endeavour crew ship approaching the International Space Station orbiting 259 miles above the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Morocco. The picture was made on 9 April less than a day after the first private crew launch to the ISS.
One of the most famous images of Earth was taken by Voyager 1 when it was 6 billion km from home. The Earth is a single pixel in that picture called The Pale Blue Dot. Voyager 1 was just about 12,000,000 km above Mt. Everest when it took this picture of the Earth and the Moon on 18 September, 1977. The Moon is on the far side of the Earth in this picture which shows East Asia, the Western Pacific, and part of the Arctic. Mt. Everest in hidden from view on the night side of the Earth.
The HiRISE (High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment) camera on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter took this picture of the Earth and Moon from orbit around Mars in November, 2016. The reddish area in the center of the Earth’s image is Australia.
This animation using data taken by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter illustrates how color and displacement maps are used in 3D animation software to paint and model an object like the Moon.
Congratulations!