Jeffrey Andrews-Hanna

We in Tucson are hurtling towards the dark side of the Earth at a speed of about 1,000 miles per hour.

And literally, if you could look out the window, you would see the landscape being plunged into darkness.

And it would stay that way until about 6 a.m.

tomorrow morning when your alarm goes off, you get up, you walk the dog, you make breakfast, you go to work or school or whatever, and you repeat every 24 hours.

Because, well, of course the moon has a dark side, and of course the Earth has a dark side, but

Really, it's the night side, not the dark side.

We've got a night side and a day side, and they change on a daily cycle as the sun rises and the sun sets.

There's nothing mysterious about it.

Pink Floyd doesn't write songs about the dark side of the Earth.

There's not a secret Transformers base on the dark side of the Earth.

It's just nighttime there, and we'll be there shortly.

And the same is true of the moon.

So the moon has a far side that's always facing away and a near side that's always facing the Earth.

And I think in popular culture, people confuse the idea of the far side of the moon with the dark side.

But in reality, because the moon always faces the same side at the earth, an observer on the moon would actually, it would always see, they'd always see the earth staying in the same place in the sky, but they'd see the sun rising and setting as the moon orbits the earth.

And it would rise and set on about a 28 day cycle instead of our 24 hour cycle on the earth.

So if this is a little disappointing that the moon doesn't have a permanently dark side that's vast and mysterious, to make it even worse, the night side of the moon isn't really all that dark.

This is a picture from the most recent solar eclipse that a friend of mine took.

He went up to where it was a total eclipse.

And if you could take your eyes away from the beautiful solar corona to the dark hole in the middle, that's the moon covering up the sun.