The Moon is Earth’s only natural satellite and the brightest object in the night sky after the Sun, orbiting at a mean distance of around 384,400 km. Even with a 20-second integration, the wealth of surface detail on show is remarkable — ancient impact craters, highland plateaus, and the dark volcanic plains known as maria stretch across the nearside face we always see, locked to us by tidal forces over billions of years. The Moon formed approximately 4.5 billion years ago from debris ejected when a Mars-sized protoplanet — named Theia — struck the young Earth. It remains the only body beyond Earth that humans have set foot on, with twelve Apollo astronauts walking its surface between 1969 and 1972.