The full rotation of the Moon as seen by NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter.
When I was a kid my mum had one of those great big oversized Reader’s Digest World Atlases you still see pop up in thrift stores from time to time, and, fun fact, at the time our edition had been published, a few years before my birth, we had not yet orbited the back of the moon, and so while the front of the moon was shown in great detail (humanity having studied it for tens of thousands of years), the far side, the dark side of the moon, the side that is permanently facing away from us, that side was mostly just blank, with a very few details around the edges that we are able to see from here due to the slight wobble.
Seeing the dark side of the moon is that recent to us, as a species. And here it is, just another thing to pause on for a moment, and smile at, and go, “Neat!” before we scroll on to something else.
The present blows my mind, sometimes. I kind of love it.
