Visuals

Device Output.

Not a looped picture: every frame of this full lunation was rendered by the device from the NASA LRO surface mosaic and on-chip astronomy — the phase, the libration wobble, and the apparent-size change are all computed, not animated.

Overview

Not a Moon Lamp.

A decorative moon lamp shows the same frozen picture forever. Lunaria shows the real Moon — the exact phase, tilt, and size it has in the sky tonight — and it works all of that out on the device, from astronomical first principles, with no app, no account, and no cloud. 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

The Real Moon, Not a Picture

Most of what makes the Moon interesting is stuff a static image can't capture. Lunaria computes each of these 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 over a month (called libration), so you actually peek a little around each edge over time. Lunaria tilts its face to match — a detail a fixed picture can't show.

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 isn't a perfect circle, 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.

Under the Hood

All On-Device

There's no server doing the math and streaming down a picture — the little chip does it all.

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. No app, no account, no API keys.

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.