You’ve probably heard it called the "dark side." That’s a total misnomer. Honestly, it’s one of those pet peeves that space nerds—myself included—will correct you on every single time. The far side gets just as much sun as the side we see from our backyard. It’s just that, thanks to tidal locking, we never see it from Earth. For centuries, it was the greatest mystery in the solar system. Then, in 1959, a grainy, noisy, black-and-white photograph changed everything.
Those first images of the far side of the moon were captured by the Soviet Union’s Luna 3. They were terrifyingly low-resolution. If you saw them today, you’d think it was a blurry photo of a dirty plate. But back then? It was revolutionary. It showed us something we didn't expect: the far side is weirdly different from the near side. It’s rugged. It’s battered. It’s missing those big, dark "seas" (maria) that make up the "Man in the Moon."
Why the Far Side Looks So Bizarre
When you look at a high-res shot from NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), the difference is jarring. The near side is covered in basaltic plains—those dark patches. The far side, though, is almost entirely high-altitude, cratered crust. It looks like the Moon took a much harder beating.
Scientists call this the Lunar Farside Highlands Problem. Why the asymmetry? One theory suggests that when the Moon was still cooling, Earth was actually radiating heat toward it. Because the Moon was already tidally locked, the near side stayed hot and gooey longer. Meanwhile, the far side cooled down, forming a much thicker crust. When asteroids hit, they couldn't punch through that thick "skin" to let the lava flow out and create those smooth maria we see from Earth.
The Evolution of How We See the "Hidden" Moon
We’ve come a long way from Luna 3. In the 1960s, the Lunar Orbiter program mapped the whole thing. Then the Apollo 8 astronauts became the first humans to actually lay eyes on it. Imagine that. Looking out a tiny window and being the only three humans in history to see that cratered wasteland with your own eyes. Jim Lovell famously remarked that it looked like a "whitish grey, like dirty beach sand."
But the real game-changer happened recently. China’s Chang’e 4 mission did something no one else had done: they landed on the far side. Specifically, they landed in the Von Kármán crater within the South Pole-Aitken Basin.
💡 You might also like: Starliner and Beyond: What Really Happens When Astronauts Get Trapped in Space
This basin is one of the largest, deepest, and oldest impact craters in the entire solar system. The images sent back by the Yutu-2 rover are crisp. They show a landscape that feels lonelier and more desolate than anything we’ve seen before. Because the Moon blocks all radio interference from Earth, this side is the "quietest" place in our neighborhood. It’s the perfect spot for radio telescopes to peer back into the early universe without the "noise" of our cell phones and TV stations.
The Photography Tech Behind the Magic
How do we even get these photos? You can't just point a camera and click "save" to the cloud. When a probe is on the far side, it's physically blocked from Earth. No signal can get through.
To solve this, missions use relay satellites. For Chang'e 4, China launched the Queqiao satellite, which sits at a specific point in space (the L2 Lagrange point) where it can "see" both the far side and Earth at the same time. It acts like a cosmic mirror, bouncing the data back home.
The LRO uses a system called LROC (Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera). It’s actually three cameras. Two are Narrow Angle Cameras (NACs) designed to provide high-resolution images of the surface—we're talking 0.5 meters per pixel. You can literally see the tracks left by the Apollo rovers in these shots. The third is the Wide Angle Camera (WAC), which provides the big-picture context.
Dealing with the Conspiracies
Let’s address the elephant in the room. If you spend five minutes on the internet, you’ll find people claiming these images of the far side of the moon are hiding alien bases or "glass towers."
📖 Related: 1 light year in days: Why our cosmic yardstick is so weirdly massive
It’s nonsense.
The "structures" people point to are almost always "pareidolia"—our brains trying to find familiar shapes in random rocks and shadows. In 2021, the Yutu-2 rover spotted a "mystery hut" on the horizon. The internet went wild. Was it an alien outpost? A monolith?
A few weeks later, the rover got closer. It was a rock. A small, oddly shaped rock that looked like a rabbit.
The reality is actually cooler than the conspiracy. The far side is a geological time capsule. Because it hasn't been "resurfaced" by lava flows like the near side, it preserves the history of the early solar system. Every crater is a record of an impact that happened billions of years ago.
Why We Need Better Images
We aren't done. NASA’s Artemis program is looking at the South Pole, which straddles the line between the near and far sides. We need ultra-high-resolution imagery to find water ice in "permanently shadowed regions" (PSRs). These are craters where the sun hasn't shone for billions of years.
👉 See also: MP4 to MOV: Why Your Mac Still Craves This Format Change
If we find enough ice, we can stay. We can turn that ice into oxygen for breathing and hydrogen for rocket fuel. The images we take in the next five years will determine where the first permanent human base is built.
How to Explore Far Side Images Yourself
You don't have to wait for a news cycle to see this stuff. Most of it is public domain.
- LROC Quickmap: This is an interactive browser tool. You can zoom in on the far side until you’re seeing individual boulders. It’s addictive.
- NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio: They produce 4K "tours" of the Moon using LRO data. It's the closest you'll get to being in orbit.
- The Planetary Society: They do a great job of hosting raw images from international missions like India’s Chandrayaan or Japan’s SLIM.
The next time you see a photo of that battered, crater-heavy landscape, remember you're looking at a part of our world that remained a total secret for 99.9% of human history. We’re the first generations to actually know what our neighbor looks like from behind.
Actionable Next Steps
If you're genuinely interested in the lunar landscape, start by downloading the LROC QuickMap mobile app or visiting the website. Toggle the "3D" view and navigate to the Aitken Basin. It gives you a perspective on the sheer scale of lunar topography that flat photos just can't match. For those into photography, look up the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera (LROC) archives—the raw TIF files are available for download if you want to try your hand at processing space data yourself. You can see the raw "red" and "blue" frames before they're composited into the final images we see in the news.