The Moon's Two Views

About this model

This is a labelled toy model, not an orrery. One honest rule runs everything: the Moon spins on its own axis exactly once per trip around Earth - so the same face always points at us. One toy tick is about one day; 28 ticks make one trip (the real trip takes 27.3 days). The Sun sits far off to one side and lights exactly half of the Moon, always the half facing it.

What is real: we only ever see one face from Earth - everywhere on Earth, always; the far side gets just as much sunlight as the near side ("dark side" is a wrong name for it); the monthly phases are our changing view of the sunlit half, never Earth's shadow (a shadow on the Moon is an eclipse - rare and brief); nobody saw the far side until the Luna 3 spacecraft photographed it in 1959.

Left out on purpose: the Moon's small wobble (libration - real watchers can peek at about 59% of the surface over time; this toy keeps exactly half hidden), mountains and maria in real places, and why the spin came to match the trip (tides did it, slowly). No real observations, locations, or personal details are used; nothing about you leaves this page.

Sources: NASA Space Place ("All About the Moon" and "What Are the Moon's Phases?"). Links are in the project readme.