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"Dark side" is a misnomer if anyone doesn't know this. The Moon is tide-locked to Earth which means the same side always faces us, but it's not tide-locked to the Sun. The dark side gets plenty of sunlight.

A lot of folks don't realize how unusual Luna is. The Earth has a gigantic satellite relative to its own size, and this might be part of what makes our planet so habitable. It does a number of things: tides, climate stability, and catching or deflecting extinction-level-event objects that would otherwise hit Earth. Earth would almost certainly still be a habitable planet without it but maybe not as stable.

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It's not a misnomer. "Dark" has multiple senses. In this case, it's "unknown, hidden, mysterious, secret".

> The hemisphere has sometimes been called the "dark side of the Moon", where "dark" means "unknown" instead of "lacking sunlight"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Far_side_of_the_Moon

More examples:

- Dark matter

- Dark continent

- Dark knight

- Dark web

Interesting. In my mother tongue it's called "back side" instead of "dark side". Looks like that "back side" is a more correct term for that.

Back side is much more correct but in colloquial English it sounds like you’re talking about the Moon’s butt. This would also mean if the Moon lost its tide lock and spun around it would be Mooning us.

Dark side sounds cooler and more mysterious.

Orbiting planets be like, "Dang, look at the moon's back side."

As I understand it, the term was originally "radio-dark side", and was used to explain the signal blackouts during Apollo lunar orbits to the public.

It also could be dark in the "unknown" sense, not literally.

Before getting pedantic with the dark side of the Moon, English academics should first fix why you can "drink a drink" but you can't "food a food", that's making my English lessons hard.

> "Dark side" is a misnomer if anyone doesn't know this.

This guy probably does... now:

https://x.com/3c3p3d/status/1782753666488774697

I mean he completely understood when they said far side to us, so he has never heard it called "dark side" before.

Literal quote, starting at 00:07: "They are going to have a lander on the far side of the moon, which is the side that's always in dark."

In French, it is called the "hidden face of the Moon", obviously because we cannot see it from the Earth point of view.

There is no darkside of a moon really,

matter of fact its all dark.

You'd think spacenews.com could get that right: was it really in their title before?