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Originally Posted by Hemi-Cuda
ok that makes more sense. for some reason i thought moons followed the same plane of orbit around planets that they do around the sun
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In general they do, but it's not exact.
And that's not really the reason that one side of the moon isn't always in sunlight.
Here's a picture of the moon going around the earth and the sun illuminating them, the red lines I added are not the moon happy to see you, that's just the face of the moon you always see since it's tidally locked.. as you can see the portion of the moon that is in sunlight changes as the moon goes around the earth, which is just another way of saying that the moon rotates just like other bodies and has its own day/night cycle, it just happens that day/night cycle is the same as the moon's orbit around the earth.