About this display

A live, full-screen rendering of the moon’s current phase, updated hourly. Designed for second monitors, office televisions, reception areas, tablets, and any always-on screen where you want a calm, useful presence rather than noise.

The image you see is the moon as it appears right now, from Earth, accurate to within the hour, rendered by NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio from real lunar terrain data. The illumination percentage, phase name, and moonrise / moonset times update with it.

The moon you’re looking at is not a photograph. It is rendered from real lunar terrain data captured by NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, including the LOLA elevation maps and LROC color mosaics. For every UTC hour of the year, NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio computes the moon’s exact orientation, libration, and lighting, then renders a frame of what an Earth-based observer would see at that moment.

Because the underlying terrain is photographic, the result looks photographic. Because the orientation is computed from orbital mechanics, the phase, libration, and apparent diameter are all astronomically correct — including subtle effects like the monthly wobble that exposes about 59% of the lunar surface to Earth over time.

Lunar imagery and data courtesy of NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio: the Moon Phase and Libration, 2026 visualization. Visualization credits: Ernie Wright (USRA), James Tralie (ADNET / eMITS), and Noah Petro (NASA Goddard).

NASA does not endorse this site. All NASA-produced content is in the U.S. public domain.

Built with Next.js as a static export, served from Cloudflare Pages, with the 8,760 hourly frames stored as alpha-channel WebP on Cloudflare R2. Astronomical calculations for moonrise and moonset use suncalc. Type is Inter and IBM Plex Mono.

No tracking cookies. No advertising. No accounts. Cloudflare Web Analytics provides aggregated traffic data without identifying visitors.

For sponsorship enquiries, corrections, or anything else: [email protected].