VIDEO DESCRIPTION:
Is there a side of the moon that never sees the sun?🌑 The answer might shock you.
For centuries, we’ve believed in the “Dark Side of the Moon.” Pink Floyd made it legendary, movies use it for dramatic tension, and it seems to make sense since we only ever see one face. But in reality, this famous phrase is one of the biggest misconceptions in astronomy.
Over my morning coffee on Planet Doug, I’m breaking down:
The Myth: Why we all grew up believing one side is light and the other is eternal darkness.
The Reality: How the moon actually rotates and why every part of it gets sunshine (just on a 14-day cycle!).
The Origin: Where the phrase really came from (hint: it’s a 250-year-old metaphor).
The View: Why buying a condo on the “far side” would be incredibly lonely, even if it isn’t dark.
Grab your coffee and let’s clear up this lunar legend once and for all! ☕️🌕
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:
Good morning and welcome to Coffee in the Morning here on Planet Doug. And I have some thoughts on my mind that I wanted to chat about. And this one occurred to me partially because Chinese New Year is coming up in a couple of days. I believe it’s going to be the year of the horse. And just from a quick glance that I took online, I think it’s actually a much more special year even than that. I think it’s the year of the Fire Horse and I don’t really know much about that yet. I haven’t done any reading on it. But yeah, Chinese New Year is coming up. And of course, Chinese New Year is based on the lunar calendar, which of course is based on the moon. And that got me thinking about the moon. And your first reaction might be, “Oh, come on. Isn’t Planet Doug supposed to be in theory about traveling? What does the moon have to do with traveling?” Well, I think the moon has a lot to do with traveling. I could go on and on about that, but the first thing that jumps out at me and why I’m thinking about the moon is that I think in our normal day-to-day life, the moon doesn’t have a big impact anymore because of light pollution. We don’t see the moon. We don’t see the stars. So if you’re living in a city and you go to work, go to school, go home, go about your daily routine, you go to bed at night, even if you go out at night, you’re largely unaware of the stars and the moon because there’s so much light in a city, you don’t see much when you look up. But when you go traveling, first of all, you break out of your daily routine, right? You’re not really connected to the clock as much. You don’t have a schedule and you often find yourself way out in the countryside, which has happened to me quite a bit on my cycling trips where, say if you’re even like you’re camping at night and you’re in your tent and it’s nighttime now, you come out of your tent, you look up and it just blows your mind. Like you’re way out in the countryside. There’s no light pollution and the brilliance of the stars, the Milky Way, just hits you like a hammer because you’re just not used to seeing that anymore. And if the moon comes out and it happens to be a full moon, it really blows your mind and then you just start thinking about the stars, you think about galaxies, you think about the moon. So traveling can be about physical travel, but of course traveling can be inside the mind as well. You know, you can think about mental traveling. And that’s what we’re going to do this morning. I’m just sitting here in Planet Doug Studios at my current hotel having a cup of morning instant coffee. But in my mind, I’m doing a lot of traveling to do with the moon.
And before I dive into the topic, one thing I want to say, a bit of a tangent, is that if perhaps you’re a young person watching this video and you’ve never really thought about the moon very much or even looked at the moon, I highly recommend doing it. Maybe, you know, maybe your father is kind of an old school father and he’s got a pair of binoculars sitting around the house. The next time that there is a full moon, grab those binoculars and look at the full moon. I guarantee if you’ve never done it before in your life, it will blow your mind because even when we do see the moon, we just sort of, oh, look, there’s the moon and it’s a bright light in the sky. A little bit of detail. But I remember as a teenager or maybe younger than a teenager, I can’t remember. The first time I grabbed a pair of binoculars back in those days, we didn’t have smartphones. We had no Samsung Galaxies with 500 super zoom or anything like that. So if you wanted to get a close-up look at anything, you looked for your dad’s binoculars. So I did and then I looked at the moon and the amount of detail that I could see on the moon surface was astonishing. You think of the moon as so far away you can’t see anything and binoculars shouldn’t make any difference but they really do. So the next time, yeah, grab your dad’s binoculars and go out or of course if you got a smartphone with a high quality camera and you can mount it steadily, you can do that as well and look at the surface of the moon and the detail you can see in terms of the craters and the mountains and things like that really is astonishing. So yeah, the moon as a constant companion up there in the sky is really quite something. And this topic also has been bumping around in my head because I’ve noticed that recently I’m finding out new information. I go through life believing something is fact. I learned it in high school. I learned it in science class, in biology class, and I’ve just gone throughout my entire life just assuming that this is true. But after you stop going to school, you might no longer be actively seeking out information. And science has brought new information. And I keep coming across facts that contradict what I always believed in. I spent my entire life believing that this simple fact was true. And then I find out, oh no, my entire life I’ve been wrong because science has proven something else. And this, of course, connects to the title of this video, something that I discovered and really came to grips with quite recently and it blew my mind. There is no dark side of the moon. That is completely false. And to be honest, I mean, I grew up my entire life just believing that there was one side of the moon that always got sunlight and the other side of the moon was always dark, right? I mean, raise your hand and be honest. Did you also grow up believing this? And maybe you still believe it today. Maybe I’m telling you something that is coming as a complete surprise. So raise your hand if you believe that one side of the moon is always being hit by sunlight and is the bright side of the moon and the other side is the dark side of the moon and it’s always dark and it never gets any sunlight. And it makes perfect sense if you believe that because every time you look at the moon you see the same side. The same side of the moon is always facing you and it’s lit up during the full moon and then yeah, that’s all you ever see. Here’s this side. It’s always bright and I can’t see the other side. So, it’s dark and the moon never seems to move. It just sits there in the sky stationary. So, yeah, bright side of the moon and then there’s a dark side of the moon. And this is reinforced everywhere in media in movies, right? How many science fiction movies or even modern space movies have you seen where there’s always this tense time when the spacecraft is going to go around the moon, right? And there’s this tension because when it goes around to the other side of the moon, they’re going to be cut off. The radio can’t communicate anymore. So, however long time it takes for the spacecraft to go around the moon during that period of time, you can’t communicate with Earth. Like the astronauts can’t communicate with Earth. Earth can’t communicate. And if they’re in the middle of an emergency, everybody holds their breath and then they come around from the other side of the moon. Oh, they get radio contact. Are you guys okay? You know, it’s a tense moment you see in so many movies and TV shows. And every time they go around the moon, they’re always going into darkness. Every time they’re going into a radio wave dead zone. That makes sense because they’re on the other side of the moon, but they’re always going into darkness. And that reinforces this idea that the other side of the moon is always dark. And here’s the light side and then there’s the dark side of the moon. And if you are of a certain age from a certain generation, my generation, the Pink Floyd album, Dark Side of the Moon, it hit like an earthquake. It was an earthshattering event when Dark Side of the Moon was released. It was the very first, was it? No, it wasn’t the first album I bought, but the very first album, like the actual vinyl album I ever bought was Boston one, you know, More Than a Feeling, but in my life as well, one of the first albums I ever bought and then I copied it onto a cassette tape was Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon. And if you’re from my generation, what we did back in those days was we listened to entire albums. So, Dark Side of the Moon from Pink Floyd, it was recorded as an album. In modern times, of course, we don’t do that anymore. We listen to songs and we just, okay, here’s a new song from this artist. But back in those days, you took Dark Side of the Moon out of its cover, laid it onto the turntable, you know, blew it off and cleaned it. You had all those rituals, and then you put the needle down and you listened to the entire side A of Dark Side of the Moon. You didn’t listen to individual songs. You put on the whole album. And when side A was finished, you turned it over and you listened to all of side B. And Pink Floyd recorded that album, chose the songs, designed it as an album, not as a set of individual songs. And that’s how we listen to music back in those days. And I still to this day all of the classic rock that I enjoy most and I listen to, every time I hear a song, I know what song comes next because in those days and I’m expecting that song to show up and it always comes as a surprise to me when it doesn’t play because we listened to the album in its entirety rather than individual songs. But anyway, as I said, Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon was a huge cultural event that like practically dominated my teenage years. And that phrase dark side of the moon is burned into our brain. So, we get it from popular media always talking about the dark side of the moon. We get movies and TV shows always referencing the dark side of the moon. And now like a major cultural event like Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon just imprints this idea in your brain. And I went throughout my entire life to be honest believing that there was a dark side of the moon. But I’m here to tell you that is absolutely not true. There is no such thing as the dark side of the moon. Now, this could get a little bit complicated in terms of astronomy and orbits and things like that, but in essence, it’s really quite a simple concept. I think from the Earth’s perspective, from my perspective, your perspective, looking up at the moon, it looks like it’s not rotating, right? Every time we look at the moon, the same side is facing us. So obviously it’s not going around. But that’s where the problem originates. In fact, the moon is rotating. It’s rotating exactly like how the earth rotates. So that’s just common sense to us. We know the earth is rotating and we’re accustomed to seeing the sun rise in the east, set in the west, and we have day and we have night. And when it’s daytime here, when it’s light here, it’s nighttime on the other side of the Earth. And it’s dark there. And it just alternates day, night, light, dark because the Earth is going around. It’s rotating. But the moon is also rotating. And relative to the sun, the moon is exactly the same as the Earth. The Earth sits here. There’s the sun. We rotate and we have day and night. And every part of the Earth gets sunshine and it gets darkness. From the moon’s position relative to the sun, it’s the same thing. The moon is rotating and relative to the sun, it goes around. It has day and night. It has light and dark. All parts of the moon get sunshine and darkness. It has day and night. So if you were living on the moon, if there was like a colony on the moon and you were living there, you would also experience the same thing. If you’re on the side of the moon facing the earth, that doesn’t matter because we’re not talking about its position relative to the earth. It’s the position relative to the sun. That’s important here. So there you are sitting on your, you know, in your condo on the moon and the moon is rotating and you will have day and night. Sometimes you’ll be in sunshine, sometimes you’ll be in darkness exactly like how it would be if you were living on Earth. So again, this concept kind of blows my mind. I always thought that say like in the future science fiction kind of future people could live on the moon and they’re selling condos on the moon, you could choose like where do you want to live? Do you want to live on the bright side or do you want to live on the dark side of the moon? And it would always be dark. So a condo on the bright side would be more expensive. But you could get a cheaper condo if you say, “Okay, you know, I’m it’s okay. I’ll live on the dark side of the moon where it’s always dark because the prices are cheaper over there.” But that’s completely false. As I said, the moon is rotating and you will get exactly the same day and night experience no matter where you live on the moon. One big difference is that the moon is rotating much slower. So here on Earth, day and night is roughly 12 hours each, right? We have a 24-hour cycle and then we go one day is 24 hours long and we go from daytime to nighttime. 12 hours 12 hours basically if you’re on the equator. But the moon is rotating more slowly and it does a full rotation only once per like 29.5 days. Essentially it goes around once per month. So you get a 14-day night and a 14 day daytime, but you’re still getting daytime and nighttime. So there is no dark side of the moon. So if this phrase dark side of the moon is 100% wrong, like where did it come from? Why do we use this phrase? Why do we all believe it’s true? And that is a very interesting story. And to be honest, it’s the most interesting part of this story and what really captured my attention because it has to do with language and metaphors. The phrase dark side of the moon dates all the way back to like the late 1700s. So, and then the 1800s. We’re talking about the 18th century and the 19th century. Astronomers back in those days, they were talking about the dark side of the moon. But when they said dark, they didn’t mean no light. They were using it metaphorically. For them, dark meant unknown. And from that perspective, it was accurate because, as I pointed out, the way the moon and the earth’s orbits and rotations work together by some quirk of all of that, they call it tidal locking. The moon is always facing in the same way, right? So when you look up at the sky, you see this side of the moon all the time. It never changes. You never see the other side of the moon. So it is dark, but it’s dark in the sense that we don’t know anything about it. Back in those days, they didn’t have spaceships. They didn’t have satellites. So nobody knew anything about the far side of the moon, but dark meant unknown. So if you think about it, you’ve heard it in other situations. Back in the days of European exploration, they referred to Africa as the dark continent. Not because it was dark, but because it was unknown. The interior of Africa was completely unknown to Europeans. Explorers hadn’t penetrated into the interior. So, Africa was a land of mystery, of danger. And it was known as the dark continent. And for explorers, they would talk about going to the dark corners of the world. And again, we’re not talking about spelunkers. They’re not saying they’re going to go into the caves where it’s dark or go places where the sun never shines. No, the dark corner of the world was a place that was unknown, hadn’t been explored yet. So that’s where the phrase came from. They referred to the far side of the moon, which would have been technically accurate because there’s the near side and the far side. They referred to the far side metaphorically as the dark side of the moon. And that phrase is so evocative, so filled with emotion that it just got embedded in popular culture and it was printed in articles, anything to do with astronomy, the moon, exploration. And later on, astronomers became more rigid with their language. They became more accurate, more technical, and astronomers stopped using dark side of the moon. You’re not going to find that phrase in their technical publications anymore. They will use accurate language about the far side of the moon. But even though astronomers stopped using dark side of the moon, nobody else did in pop culture, in mainstream articles about astronomy, about space exploration, people in the normal world, non-astronomers, non-scientists, we just kept using the phrase dark side of the moon, but we forgot that it’s metaphorical and we thought it meant a physical meaning. That when people talk about the dark side of the moon, they’re saying, “Well, yeah, it’s always dark because the moon isn’t rotating.” But as I pointed out, that is not true at all. All of the surface of the moon gets sunshine and darkness exactly like how we do here on Earth. So, I guess the takeaway from this morning coffee ramble is that there really is no dark side of the moon in the sense that it never sees light. There is a dark side of the moon if you think of it in terms of being relatively unknown. Of course, in modern time, spacecraft have photographed the far side of the moon in full daylight. You know, I talked earlier about how every time a movie shows a spacecraft going around the moon, they always go into darkness, but there’s no reason why that has to happen that way. In real life, when a spaceship goes around to the far side of the moon, depending on the time that they do that, it could be lit up by the sun or it could be dark. It just depends on when you go around it. So many spacecraft have been scheduled to go around to the far side of the moon during that side’s daytime because they’re there to take pictures and they’re not going to go there when it’s dark. So they time it so that they go there when it’s being blasted with full sunlight and then they take all of their pictures. But even so, even though in modern times we know a lot more about the far side of the moon, we still don’t know as much about it as we do of the near side because we’ve been looking as a human race at the near side for millennia. We’ve been studying it far longer. But that doesn’t mean the far side is completely unknown. But you could say it is still the dark side of the moon in the sense that we don’t know as much about it as we do the near side. So we can keep using the phrase. It still holds meaning. But you just have to understand that it’s more about how much we know about it and it’s more of a metaphor than any kind of a scientific statement about how it’s always dark over there and then always light over here. Perhaps a final thought for this topic is something I just stumbled across while thinking about this and reading about this. And again, it is a brand new thought, something that never occurred to me in my entire lifetime. And as I mentioned at the beginning of this video, that happens more and more often. And I find it fascinating where yeah, you’ve lived as long as I have and you feel like you kind of have a handle on what’s going on in the world and you know things and you keep finding out that some of the things you know are completely wrong. You know, as science marches on and then there are things that are true that in your entire lifetime you never thought about. And while I was thinking about this whole dark side of the moon business, I was contrasting what the reality is with the myth. So the myth I’ve talked about at length, the myth is that the far side of the moon is always dark and the near side is always light. That is not true at all. The moon rotates and has day and night. The day and night just happens to be a lot longer and more extreme than days and nights here on Earth. But it basically has the same daytime nighttime daylight cycle as we do here on Earth. But that doesn’t mean they’re exactly the same. And this is something I never thought about. I was joking earlier about how if you were going to live on a moon colony and you were trying to decide where you want to live, do you want to live on the far side or the near side, you don’t have to worry about one side being dark cuz they’re all exactly the same from that point of view. They all experience the same daytime nighttime rhythm. So you don’t have to worry about that. But that doesn’t mean they’re exactly the same. The far side, what people call the dark side of the moon is actually much lonelier because one big difference again getting back to this idea that from our perspective the moon is not rotating the same side is always facing the earth. And if that’s true, if you are living on the moon colony on the near side, every time you look up at the night sky, you see the Earth. It’s there hanging in the void, motionless, just like the moon does from here. So, you can see where you came from. You can see the Earth. But if you’re living on the far side of the moon, it never faces the Earth. You’re facing out towards space. So, it’s much much lonelier. You never see your original home. No matter how long you live on the far side of the moon, no matter how many times it rotates, how many times it orbits, because of the mechanics of these rotations and orbits, you never face the Earth. So, you would never see it. You would just be looking out at the dark expanse of space. So, depending on your personality and what you’re looking for, you would have to take that into account when you’re buying your moon condo. Do I want to live on the near side where I can see the earth or do I want to be more of an adventurer, a real traveler and live on the far side of the moon and then I never see the earth at all daytime or nighttime. All I see is the vastness of space. And that could be for some people, yeah, pretty tough psychological burden. It could feel a lot lonelier over there. But don’t worry, you will not be living in eternal darkness. You will still get a day and night rhythm. You just have to be aware that your daytime and nighttime is a lot longer. Each is going to be about 2 weeks long in terms of Earth time. So, there you have it. Morning coffee with Doug and my thoughts about the dark side of the moon.