... Moon Phase below . ... ARTICLE: Why the moon always shows us the same face . ... Before you continue reading, you should know that this was not always the case, i.e. the Moon once was rotating with respect to the Earth, so that on every night a terrestrial observer (if there was one, because this was long, long before mankind appeared on our planet, and even before any major animals had appeared) saw another face of the Moon. ... Figure 1 (not to scale) shows how we can imagine the system Earth-Moon...