This new video shows exactly how the Moon will look to us on Earth during the entire year of 2013. While the Moon always keeps the same face to us, it’s not exactly the same face. Because of the tilt in its axis and shape of its orbit, we see the Moon from slightly different angles over the course of a month, and the year. Normally, we don’t see how the Moon “wobbles” in its orbit or as it moves closer and farther away from Earth. But seeing the entire year compressed down to 5 minutes, we can see the changes in libration, and axis tilt — as well as the most noticeable changes, the Moon’s phases.
In this new video from Goddard’s Scientific Visualization Studio, each frame represents one hour. In addition, as an improvement from their previous Moon visualization , this also shows other relevant information, including Moon orbit position, subearth and subsolar points, distance from the Earth.
At the SVS website, there is more information, including a Dial-A-Moon, where you can put in a certain date and find out how the Moon will look on a specific day.
“Thanks to Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, we now have excellent terrain maps of the Moon that can tell us the elevation at any point on the surface,” said Ernie Wright, who put this new video together. “I use those maps to make the Moon sphere bumpy in all the right places. That allows the rendering software to realistically simulate all the shadows and the ragged terminator (the dividing line between day and night).”
And if you’d like to have a handy bring-along app to find out anywhere what they Moon will be doing, check out Universe Today’s Phases of the Moon app, – available on iPhone or Android.
Source: NASA
Splendid piece of visual work! Elegance of violin play, befits a silver Maiden’s graceful waltz, radiant in Earth’s glow to stay. Though of adornment plain and barren, yet with subtle form small, synchronously she turns around her magnificent World of Life glory, through passing constellations. Their precisely-choreographed motions of Solar-year, music of finest strings scores well, in celestial revolutions near. From the beginning, warmed in Sunlight, they dance forever under the stars of a Galaxy’s majestic Night, in graceful step of rhythmic-lunar cycle. Held in gravity-bond close, unbreakable, their passage through time, unmistakable. A year in her silver-light biography, is breathtaking in animated story. Its volume of numbers do tell! Their movements of Life-embrace, through months of Time, witnessed in years through Space, a wonder to behold!
Of all the Lunar animations I’ve seen.. this one’s the best! Full screen and crank up the volume!