The phases of the Moon are easy to understand once you realise and remember that the phases are dependent upon the location of the Sun, Moon, and Earth. But we don't see the moon all the time during the day, and that's because of where the moon might be in the sky. The Man in the Moon refers to any of several pareidolic images of a human face, head or body that certain traditions recognize in the disc of the full moon.The images are composed of the dark areas of the lunar maria, or "seas" and the lighter highlands of the lunar surface. The Moon’s rotation is tidally locked to the Earth. Numerical simulations and analysis show that the Moon locks into resonance with a statistical preference of facing either the current near-side or far-side toward Earth.

With Q = 100 in analogy with the solid Earth, the current configuration is nearly certain. But why do we see this face of the Moon, and not a different side? The near-side is largely covered by dense, topographically low, dark mare basalts, the pattern of which to some, resembles the image of a man’s face.

Instead, we only see a change in shape because we can only see the parts of the Moon that are being lit by the Sun. In all of human history, only 24 people have ever flown to the vicinity of the Moon, traveling hundreds of … However, sometimes a whole human figure is seen, usually carrying sticks or thorns.

"Sometimes to see the moon you'd have to look through the Earth and we can't do that," O'Meara said. In the Moon’s present orbit, with the best-estimated geophysical parameters and dissipation parameter Q = 35, trapping into the current higher-energy configuration is preferred. If we set Starry Night software to that date, and its location to New York, we see that the moon rises at 11:06 p.m. the night before. Different amounts of the illuminated part of the moon are visible from Earth. The most famous example is probably the man in the moon. Says Prof. Aharonson, “For me, what is most interesting is not seeing the Man in the Moon, but the elegance of how the system works.” Prof. Aharonson would like to acknowledge support from the Lunar Reconnaissance Project. The "face," of course, is just an illusion, shaped by … But at times, the Moon is visible even in the daytime.

Why Do We See the Phases of the Moon?

Vice President Mike Pence has promised that we will see US astronauts on the moon by 2024 (including the first women to ever touch the lunar surface), in a program called Artemis.
The lunar phases are caused by the changing angles of the sun, the moon and Earth, as the moon revolves around Earth. The man in the moon is either the face or the body of a man, but usually the chief representation is of a face, such as the one that got a rocket in the eye in George Méliès’s early film masterpiece A Trip to the Moon (1902).