Why the Moon’s two faces are so different

The Moon, by far, is the brightest object and largest object that’s visible to human eyes in Earth’s night sky. Compared to Venus, the next brightest object that appears, the Moon is thirty times the diameter, takes up almost 1000 times the surface area, and appears about 1,000,000 times brighter than Venus. Moreover, the Moon doesn’t appear as a uniform disk to us, but rather shows incredible differences from place-to-place across the surface, even as viewed from our limited perspective here on Earth. To the naked eye, these differences might just appear as bright-and-dark patches: the so-called “man in the Moon” is the easiest feature to see. But if you take a look through a telescope, you won’t just see those dark spots silhouetted against the brighter portions, but also mountain ridges, craters with high walls and rays splaying out from them, and shadowy relief along the night-day boundary, known as the Moon’s terminator. <a href="https://medium.com/starts-with-a-bang/why-the-moons-two-faces-are-so-different-f4c47e90320a">Visit Now</a>