Well, technically nobody will ever see the dark side of the moon, because no such thing exists. All sides of the moon receive sunlight, but there's still a side you will never see first-hand...unless you're an astronaut on a lunar mission.
It's the farside, not the dark side. The concepts are similar; the names are different.
From Earth, we only ever see one hemisphere of the moon. The farside is always out of our sight, facing off into space. The moon rotates just like the earth, but it rotates for once for every revolution around Earth: 28.5 days. That is roughly equal to a month, or the amount of time it takes to complete a revolution, a synchronous rotation. Therefore, we only see one side.
The farside is riddled with craters, since it intercepts many earth-bound meteors. This image was taken by Apollo 16.
Oh well, I guess one side is better than no sides.
A grammar note: Earth is only capitalized when referring to the celestial body without the use of a definite article, namely the.
2 comments:
Thanks for clearing up the grammatical "earth" issue. I'd always assumed it to be true, but I see it mis-capitalized so often, that I assumed that I was just dumb. Which may still be true. But at least I now know when to capitalize "Earth."
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