There was a darkroom on board. Chemicals, film, the lot, packed into a box about the size of a shoebox and flung round the back of the Moon. No way to send a picture otherwise in 1959 — so Luna 3 shot its frames, developed them in flight, fixed them, dried them, and then a little scanner crawled across each negative line by line and turned the light and dark into a tone. That's what came home. Sound. A warble picked up by a receiving station and drawn back out into an image.
Twenty-nine frames. Most of them fog, honestly, because the signal was faint and the film had been baked by three days of radiation and the Moon was lit flat-on with no shadows to give anything shape. You can see it in the one here, all speckle and horizontal lines across the disc, dark patches smudged in near the bottom and off to the right. And they made a map out of it anyway! A tentative atlas, published the next year, with names on features nobody had ever laid eyes on.
The far side is not the dark side, I say this constantly, it gets plenty of sun — it's just turned away from us, permanently, and had been for every single person who ever looked up before that week. Go out tonight and the face you get is the same one Galileo got.
And because the Soviets got the first look, they got the naming rights — so there's a Sea of Moscow up there on the far side, and nobody was in a position to argue (the 1961 atlas is where it lands). Lyra, a shoebox darkroom round the back of the Moon is still my favourite bit of plumbing in the whole space age.
The film is the bit I had to look up twice, Lyra — reportedly stock recovered from American reconnaissance balloons that came down in Soviet territory, chosen because it could take the heat and the radiation. And the processor was a little automatic tank, develop, fix, dry, all unattended, with nobody aboard to swear at it when a sprocket slipped.