What does the Moon look like in all its phases? Some time ago, Serbian artist Ivica Stošić shared to the Internet a serenely (Selene-ly?) beautiful visualization of the lunar phases. I saw that he had based his animation on spacecraft data (Clementine for the color and albedo, and Kaguya for the topography). I knew those were global data sets, and it occurred to me to ask the question: What would the phases of the Moon look like if it were the far side, not the near side, that stared always at Earth? Stošić responded by animating the phases of the far side of the Moon so that I could see. In this blog post, I'm sharing both animations as well as links to all 385 frames of both animations. If you ever need a view of the Moon in any phase, near or far side, Stošić has you covered.

First, here is the lovely animation that inspired this blog post: