Caption: A Moon image of the far side of the Moon.

Features:

1. The far side is NOT the perpetually dark side: it has as much daytime and nighttime as the near side of the Moon.

2. Lunar north is at the top; lunar south is at the bottom. The lunar west is at the left and the lunar east at the right. The lunar directions are in selenographic coordinates, NOT directions on the celestial sphere which we often use for discussing the near side.

3. Because of the lunar libration, we do see ∼ 59 % of the Moon's surface from the Earth (see Wikipedia: Tidal locking: Occurrence: Earth's Moon), but only ∼ 50 % at one time, of course.

   So two slivers of the far side are obliquely seen from the Earth.

4. The far side lacks the large maria which make the near side more interesting to look at and probably for lunar geology.

5. The far side was first seen by the Soviet space program probe Luna 3, 1959 Oct07.

   Before that and throughout human history, the far side of the Moon was a mystery.

6. Since the Soviets first saw the far side, they gave lots of Russian names.

   For example, the largest of the small far side maria is Mare Moscoviense. It's in the upper left quadrant of the image.

   Mare Moscoviense is at 147.9° E longitude in selenographic coordinates which have their zero at the center of the near side. This verifies---when you think about it---that the lunar west is the at the left in the image.