Moon Phases for Spherical Displays
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- Visualizations by:
- Ernie Wright
- View full credits
The most visible change in the appearance of the Moon is its monthly cycle of phases. Every 29.5 days, the Moon changes from a thin crescent low in the western sky in early evening, to a full disk that rises at sunset and is up all night, back to a thin crescent rising just before sunrise. The Moon's phases are caused by its orbit around the Earth. As the Moon circles us, different parts of it face the Sun. When the side of the Moon facing the Earth is sunlit, we see a full Moon. When the Sun is up on the far side of the Moon, we see a thin crescent, or nothing at all.
This animation shows the sunlit and shadowed portions of the Moon over the course of a month. The video can loop continuously. Viewers on all sides of the sphere see a full progression of lunar phases like those visible from Earth. Viewers facing the near side of the Moon will also see Earthshine, light reflected from the Earth that faintly illuminates the night side of the crescent Moon.
Amateur astronomers pay particular attention to features near the terminator, the line dividing day and night on the Moon. Long shadows and high contrast near the terminator bring out details in the terrain that are hard to see at other times. The animation uses elevation data from Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter's laser altimeter to recreate this sense of heightened detail near the terminator.
Credits
Please give credit for this item to:
NASA's Scientific Visualization Studio
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Visualizer
- Ernie Wright (USRA) [Lead]
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Technical support
- Ian Jones (ADNET Systems, Inc.)
- Laurence Schuler (ADNET Systems, Inc.)
Missions
This visualization is related to the following missions:Datasets used in this visualization
LRO DEM (A.K.A. Digital Elevation Map) (Collected with the LOLA sensor)
Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter LROC WAC Color Mosaic (A.K.A. Natural Color Hapke Normalized WAC Mosaic) (Collected with the LRO Camera sensor)
This natural-color global mosaic is based on the 'Hapke normalized' mosaic from LRO's wide-angle camera. The data has been gamma corrected, white balanced, and range adjusted to more closely match human vision.
See more visualizations using this data setNote: While we identify the data sets used in these visualizations, we do not store any further details, nor the data sets themselves on our site.
Related pages
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ID: 4310 Visualization
Moon Phases Loop
Read moreA looping animation showing a complete cycle of average lunar phases. || This short looping animation shows a complete cycle of lunar phases. The view is geocentric, lunar north up. The frames are at intervals of 3 hours, with a total length of 236 frames representing a synodic month of 29.5 days. To find the frame number corresponding to a particular age in days, use the formulaframe number = ( days × 8 ) + 1The depiction of phases here is idealized: It ignores both libration and subsolar latitude. In effect, it assumes that the Moon's orbit is perfectly circular and that both its orbit and its equator are in the plane of the ecliptic. In reality, the Moon's orbit is an ellipse inclined 5.1° to the ecliptic, and its axis is tilted another 1.5° from its orbit. These conditions combine to make the Moon's true cycle of phases more complex than what is shown here. Check out an accurate visualization of the current lunar phase and libration.The following images are frames from the animation representing particular phases. Each caption gives both the name of the phase and its age, or time since New Moon. Lunar north up corresponds to the view from northern latitudes; for southern hemisphere observers, the images should be rotated 180 degrees. ||
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