The dark side of the moon just got a little bit less mysterious.
Artemis II astronauts on their 10-day mission to travel farther away from Earth than anybody has ever before got to see a first-of-its-kind view of the side of the moon we can't see on our home planet.
The dark side of the moon is so named because of how mysterious it is, but not because it's actually dark. The dark side, or far side, is never visible to observers on Earth because the amount of time it takes the moon to orbit Earth is about the same amount of time it takes to rotate around its own axis.
New photos shared by NASA show never-before-seen views of the far side of the moon and Earth beyond it. The Artemis II astronauts – NASA's Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Hammock Koch, and Canadian Space Agency's Jeremy Hansen – are the first humans to see some parts of the far side with unaided eyes, according to NASA. The striking photos an an "Earthset," in which the Earth dropped below the lunar horizon, and an eclipse.
"As we surpass the furthest distance humans have ever traveled from planet Earth, we do so in honoring the extraordinary efforts and feats of our predecessors in human space exploration," Hansen said. "We will continue our journey even further into space before Mother Earth succeeds in pulling us back to everything that we hold dear. But we most importantly choose this moment to challenge this generation and the next to make sure this record is not long-lived."
