I understand that moon is tidally locked to the earth and we never see the other side (side facing away from earth). I suppose that’s called far side, but is it also the dark side? Also is there any overlap between dark side and the lunar poles?
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They mean the same thing. “Dark” in this case means “unknown”, but sometimes it gets misunderstood as literally dark.
The “dark side” of the moon is just another name for the far side – the side that’s never facing Earth.
It’s not actually “dark”, it got called “dark” because it was unseen and for a long time we had no information about it. We never saw that dark/far side until we were able to send orbiters around the back, which happened in pretty recent history. In the days before that, globes of the moon were [literally blank on one side](https://uploads-ssl.webflow.com/5ba0380654a6876d6e670007/5c4f591d43b439f8924e8b8c_DSC00333—-.jpg) because we couldn’t see what was there to map it. “The dark side” of the moon was a nickname for it being mysterious, uncharted, and always facing away from us.
The “dark” side is not actually dark. It gets just as much daylight as the rest of it, maybe more actually. Because when it’s between earth and sun the far side is totally lit up.
Answer: there is no such thing as the dark side of the moon.
Because we only see one side, the opposite side is anecdotally referred to as the dark side, but it experiences the same light/dark cycle as the side that we see.
When the side we see is all-but a thin arc, the ‘dark side’ is illuminated entirely.
When we experience a solar eclipse, where the moon is exactly between the earth and the sun, the ‘dark side’ is in full sun.
Well, we’re going to have to get into prescriptivism vs. descriptivism here.
Properly speaking, the Moon has a dark side in exactly the same way the Earth does–at any given moment, half of it is facing away from the Sun and is therefore dark. What it does not have is a side that is *always* dark.
It does have a side that is always facing away from the Earth, properly referred to as the “far side.” When the Moon is full, the far side is also the dark side. (When the Moon is new, the near side is the dark side.)
The Moon’s axis is minimally tilted, so one of the poles is slightly in the dark at any given time (well, at the equinoxes, both poles are right at the edge of the dark).
All of the above is the prescriptivist approach. If you go for descriptivist, you’re going with how people use the wording, and in fact many people do refer to the far side as the dark side.
I generally tend to a descriptivist approach to language, but with technical terms, I prefer prescriptivism, and since my degree is in planetary science, this is one case where I strongly prefer it.
It’s exactly what it sounds like – it’s the half of the moon that’s not currently illuminated by the sun. It’s a common misconception that the moon has a *permanent* dark side, which is not correct. People mistake the *dark* side of the moon with the *far* side of the moon. One side of the moon always faces way from the Earth, but all sides of the moon get equal amounts of sunlight.
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