How does the day/night cycle work on a non-tidally locked moon?

So to keep this simple, imagine a planet much like ours, orbiting a star. For the sake of this example, let's give the planet a 24 hour rotation, and a 364 day orbit around the star.

Now, this planet has a moon, the moon is not-tidally locked to the planet, it also has a 24 hour rotation, but it orbits the planet on a 28 day cycle. This gives the moon 13 full orbits around the planet per year.

So, what I'm trying to wrap my head around is what the day/night cycle on the moon actually looks like. When the moon is on the "sun-side" of the planet, the rotation of the moon would give the moon a pretty typical day of 12-ish hours of light and 12-ish hours of dark. But what about when the moon is behind the planet? I feel like at this point the day/night cycle is pretty meaningless because the moon is always in the planet's shadow, so it would be night all the time. Over a 28 day moon cycle, half of the cycle (14 days) would have a regular day/night, then the other half of the cycle (another 14 days) would just be one long night.

I get that depending on the position of the planet and the moon with respect to the star will shift the cycle around a bit, and also that when the moon is near the "edges" of its orbit around the planet the days/nights will be longer/shorter.

Is my (very basic) understanding basically correct? When the moon is behind the planet it will just be night for half the moon's cycle?

posted about 6 years ago

fiend‭

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