Fact #102
Phases & orbit
Sunrise to sunrise at a spot on the Moon takes 29.5 Earth days, so any base there has to sit through about 354 hours of continuous night.
Because the Moon turns once per orbit, the Sun crawls across its sky at half a degree an hour. Fourteen days of daylight bake the ground to 120°C and fourteen days of darkness drop it to below -170°C, which is why solar-powered landers so often die on their first night and why the polar ridges that stay lit are such valuable real estate.
Source: NASA Moon facts (opens in a new tab) · checked Sep 2026