Can you see Earth from the far side of the Moon?
Never, from the middle of it — and the engine can prove it rather than assert it. Computed for Daedalus crater, the quietest place we know of.
Open this exact moment — and move the clock yourself
Live Rendered here and now by the Lunar Aspect engine, not a screenshot. Download free on the App Store
No. Not at midnight, not at midday, not at any point in the month or the year. From Daedalus crater, near the centre of the far side, Earth sits 84.5° below the horizon — and it never climbs out.
The engine can prove this, not just claim it
Sampling every hour for a month, the highest Earth ever gets here is -77.48° and the lowest is -89.37°. Both are far below the horizon, and the difference between them is just libration rocking a permanently hidden Earth a little further down and a little less far down.
At the same instant, an observer at Tranquility Base on the near side has Earth at 70.8° above the horizon, 99.89% lit. Same moment, same Moon, two completely different skies — decided entirely by which side of the line you are standing on.
The far side is not the dark side
It gets exactly as much sunlight as the near side does; the Sun is 82.6° above the horizon in this frame. What the far side lacks is not light, it is Earth. The phrase “dark side of the Moon” means hidden, not unlit, and nobody saw it at all until 1959.
Which makes it the quietest place we know of
Two thousand kilometres of rock between you and every radio transmitter, television station, mobile mast and radar set on Earth. Nowhere else within reach is shielded like that, which is why radio astronomers keep proposing to put a telescope exactly here. The thing that makes it lonely is the thing that makes it valuable.
How these numbers were produced
Every figure on this page came out of the ephemeris that runs inside Lunar Aspect, computed for Daedalus crater, far side at 2026-10-10 15:23 UTC. Nothing here was typed in by hand: the page is generated, and a number that the engine stops producing breaks the build rather than going quietly stale.
| Value | Produced by |
|---|---|
| 84.5° below the horizon | compute().earth.alt at Daedalus |
| -77.48° | highest earth.alt over 30 days of samples |
| -89.37° | lowest earth.alt over 30 days of samples |
| 70.8° above the horizon | compute().earth.alt at Tranquility Base, same instant |
| 82.6° above the horizon | compute().sun.alt |
| 99.89% | compute().earth.illum |
Engine build 84048b2 2026-09-20 ·
page generated 2026-09-19 ·
positions are apparent, referred to the observing site rather than to the
Moon’s centre.
Move the date yourself
This page is one frozen moment. The engine that computed it runs on a phone, at any date, from anywhere on the Moon — the eclipses, the planets, the comets and Earth’s phase, all of it computed rather than canned.