Visuals

Device Output.

Every frame of this full lunation was rendered by the device itself, from the NASA LRO surface mosaic and on-chip astronomy. The phase, the libration wobble and the apparent-size change are all computed fresh.

Overview

Tonight's Moon, Worked Out on the Desk.

Lunaria shows the real Moon: the exact phase, tilt, and size it has in the sky tonight. It works all of that out on the device itself, from astronomical first principles. Power is all it needs. Set it on a desk and it quietly tracks the real thing overhead.

It's the Moon-focused sibling of Planetaria, built on the same little round-screen hardware.

How It Knows

Everything the Moon Actually Does

The Moon is always doing several things at once. Lunaria computes each of them live.

Phase

Tonight's True Phase

Exactly how much of the Moon is lit right now, and from which side. Computed on-device and checked against NASA's JPL Horizons ephemeris to within 0.05°.

Libration

The Moon's Wobble

The Moon slowly rocks side-to-side and nods up-and-down across a month (called libration), so you peek a little around each edge as it goes. Lunaria tilts its face to match, and the wobble plays out over the month exactly as it does overhead.

Earthshine

The Dark Side, Faintly Lit

On a crescent night you can just make out the whole disc; that's sunlight bouncing off Earth onto the Moon's dark part. Lunaria renders that soft glow (earthshine) on the unlit limb.

Apparent Size

The Disc Breathes

The Moon's orbit is an ellipse, so it looks about 14% bigger when it's closest (perigee) than when it's farthest (apogee). The disc grows and shrinks to match the real distance.

Moment Mode

Freeze the display to any date from 1900 to 2099: the Moon exactly as it looked (or will look) on a birthday, an anniversary, the night someone was born. A keepsake of a specific sky.

Inside

All On-Device

The little chip does all the math itself and draws every frame locally.

The Math

Textbook Astronomy, On a Chip

The phase, libration, and position come from standard astronomical algorithms (Meeus / the Astronomical Almanac) running on the device. The Moon's surface is NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter global photo mosaic, lit from the correct angle for the moment.

The Hardware

A Round Screen & a Small Chip

A 1.75″ round AMOLED (466×466, deep blacks) driven by an ESP32-S3 (8 MB PSRAM, 16 MB flash), USB-C powered. Wi-Fi is used only once, to learn the time and your location; after that it works offline forever. Setup happens on the device itself, start to finish.

Honest status

Lunaria is coming soon, in pre-release with a waitlist through the CosNFX store. It shares Planetaria's proven ESP32-S3 round-AMOLED platform.