Explanation: Tidally locked in synchronous rotation, the Moon always presents its familiar nearside to denizens of planet Earth. From lunar orbit, the Moon's farside can become familiar, though. In fact this sharp picture, a mosaic from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter's wide angle camera, is centered on the lunar farside. Part of a global mosaic of over 15,000 images acquired between November 2009 and February 2011, the highest resolution version shows features at a scale of 100 meters per pixel. Surprisingly, the rough and battered surface of the farside looks very different from the nearside covered with smooth dark lunar maria. A likely explanation is that the farside crust is thicker, making it harder for molten material from the interior to flow to the surface and form dark, smooth maria.

Photographer: Ray Boren
Summary Author: Ray Boren

Under a big blue sky, the morning sun illuminates a central portion of Wyoming’s majestic Teton Range, which is mirrored via specular reflection in a calm and equally blue bay of Jackson Lake in Grand Teton National Park. In this photograph, taken on May 23, 2025, the park’s namesake Grand Teton peak, topping out at 13,775 feet (4,199 meters) above sea level, is on the far-left side of the image, to the south. Blocky Mount Moran (12,610 feet; 3,840 m) rises prominently just left of center. 

The snow still covering the Tetons on this spring day makes it easy to envision the Pleistocene ice-age glaciers that helped carve the mountains’ jagged summits, cirques, and U-shaped drainages. The Park Service explains that the Teton Fault began tilting the range’s primarily granite mountain block upward about 10 million years ago while also dropping the valley of Jackson Hole. Although masked by snow in the photograph, almost a dozen glaciers remain in the park today, some moving and some mere remnants. They, and erosion from water, wind and gravity, continue to shape the dramatic terrain.

Grand Teton National Park, Wyoming Coordinates: 43.7904, -110.6818

Related Links:
Sunset and Specular Reflection at Great Salt Lake
Davey Jackson’s Valley in Winter
The Tetons, from the Idaho Side