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Monday - Friday: 9am-5.00pm

The phases of the moon are complex, so here is a clip to help..

On the left is a complete rotation map of the moon. But from earth, we only see one side of it as shown in the right animation. This side faces the earth permanently in a 'captured' rotation orbit. so the back is never seen. Only when the space age began, did we send probes to the far side and image it. Russia was first to accomplish this in 1959 with a spacecraft called Lunar 3. The first human eyes to see the back were the crew of Apollo 8 on December 24th 1968; the very day I became fascinated by this topic age five... and a half.