# moon.k0ba.com

> A real-time 3D Moon in the browser. Real relief from NASA laser altimetry, lit by the Sun exactly as it is right now, with measured temperature and sunlight maps and source-backed cards for the places people are planning to land and build, mostly near the lunar south pole. Made by k0ba (https://k0ba.com).

The site is a single interactive page (WebGL, no account, no cookies). Everything on it is computed from public data, and nothing is a mission plan. The habitat score is an illustration, not a mission study.

## What you can do there

- Turn and zoom the whole Moon; the day–night line and the shadows match the current date and time.
- Relief strength: 1×, 3× or 10× vertical exaggeration of the real terrain.
- Run time forwards or backwards. One lunar day (sunrise to sunrise) lasts about 29.5 Earth days; at the poles the Sun circles low along the horizon instead of rising high.
- Temperature maps: right now, daily maximum and minimum, day–night swing, noon and midnight (LRO Diviner).
- South-pole maps: sunlight fraction, permanently shadowed regions (possible water ice), Earth in view (direct radio contact), slope, and a composite habitat score.
- Site cards: Shackleton crater and rim, the connecting ridge, de Gerlache, Malapert Mountain, Nobile rim, Chang'e-7's target area, north-pole rims, lava-tube pits, and past landings (Apollo, Chang'e, Chandrayaan-3, SLIM, IM-1, IM-2, Blue Ghost and others). Each card shows values sampled from the maps at that spot.
- Place a true-scale surface base (about 140 m across: domes, a pressurised module, a buried tunnel, a lander, vertical solar arrays) on any candidate habitat. It flies the Flag of Earth (Oskar Pernefeldt, public domain): one flag for everyone.
- The sky is real: about 118,000 Hipparcos stars, the Milky Way, the Sun, the Earth with its real phase, and Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn where they are right now as seen from the Moon.

## Data and methods

- Colour and global relief: NASA Scientific Visualization Studio CGI Moon Kit (LRO LROC WAC, LOLA).
- South-pole relief: LRO LOLA LDEM_80S_20M (NASA GSFC); 5 m site models (NASA GSFC PGDA, Barker et al. 2021, 2023).
- Close-up terrain and photos: LRO LROC NAC stereo models and mosaics (NASA/GSFC/Arizona State University); SLDEM2015; SELENE (Kaguya) Terrain Camera (© JAXA/SELENE).
- Temperatures: LRO Diviner, UCLA (Williams et al. 2017, 2019).
- Sunlight, Earth visibility, permanent shadow: NASA GSFC PGDA (Mazarico et al. 2011).
- Sky: NASA SVS Deep Star Maps 2020; Hipparcos new reduction (ESA; van Leeuwen 2007); Earth from NASA Blue Marble Next Generation.
- Ephemeris: Meeus, Astronomical Algorithms (astronomia), checked against JPL Horizons; planets from VSOP87.
- Shading: Hapke BRDF (CosmoScout VR, DLR); shadows traced over the terrain.

## Links

- [The Moon](https://moon.k0ba.com/): the app itself.
- [k0ba](https://k0ba.com/): who made it, and other work.