The first look at the far side

Luna 3 photographed the side of the Moon nobody had ever seen, developed the film on board, and radioed the pictures home.

The spacecraft carried a miniature darkroom: it developed, fixed and dried the negatives in flight, then scanned them with a light beam and transmitted the result. The images were grainy and astonishing, and showed a hemisphere with almost none of the dark seas that define the near side.