Earthshine is such a cool phenomenon to point out

&gt; People are impressed if you can name the current moon phase and tell them what it&#x27;ll be nextI&#x27;m speechless

For a waxing moon the circular arc is on the right hand side and for a waning moon the circular arc is on the left hand side [Here in the Northern Hemisphere]. 
It would have been nice if the mnemonics Decreasing &amp; Cresting worked but they don&#x27;t. I personally use Developing &amp; Collapsing to refer, respectively, to the waxing and waning moon. Has anyone a better couple of words than these?

People are impressed if you can name the current moon phase and tell them what it&#x27;ll be next. But it only takes a mental model of where the sun, earth, and moon orbits are relative to each other. I also find people are intrigued by the concept of earthshine, and often haven&#x27;t noticed it until you point it out.

And a lunar eclipse only during full moon…. These constraints made it easier to predict eclipses in the past.

&gt; solar eclipse I was explaining to people how an eclipse must occur during a new moonHey, that&#x27;s the first the time I realized this.

The really satisfying thing for me was when I was on a sailing course and was instructed in how the moon causes the tides, and how the phase of the moon corresponds to springs and neaps.

Thinking about how the Moon, a body over 380,000 kilometers away, can perfectly block the Sun (something 400 times larger than itself) because of their relative distances is just mind-blowing for me

Similarly - as full moon must be opposite to the sun, full moon moonrise happens around sunset and moonset happens around sunrise.Also full moon rises the highest in winter, contrary to the sun - when it’s at it’s lowest[1].Funny things happen at the poles where sun is above&#x2F;below horizon for half a year: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;astronomy.stackexchange.com&#x2F;a&#x2F;27750" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;astronomy.stackexchange.com&#x2F;a&#x2F;27750</a>[1] the further from equator you are the more pronounced it is.

As a big fan of both the Moon and ciechanow.ski this article is right up my alley.During the 2024 solar eclipse I was explaining to people how an eclipse must occur during a new moon, and this article would have really helped. The discussion also made me realize how little most people spend thinking about the solar system and the relationship between the moon, sun, and earth. These things fascinate me (I think it&#x27;s just the sheer scale of it all), and I hope to be able to get more people interested as well. The solar eclipse was great for that!

We like the moon! Because it is so close to us.

At my current employer, Kuva Space, I&#x27;m among other things responsible for the commisioning and in orbit calibration of the payload. The Moon is a major calibration target for us, and between waxing and waining crescents I spent a lot of time analyzing Moon shots to perform radiometric calibration and camera parameter optimizations. The Moon doesn&#x27;t know about weekends and images are not always downlinked at the most convenient times so that makes my life a bit more hectic.

Werewolf hunter? Sorority nurse? Doctor specializing in Cushing syndrome?

My wife is a social worker at the county welfare office and swears there is a strong correlation between phase of the moon and the nature of her work with the homeless. To the point where where she checks the calendar to schedule more time for crisis handling around the time of the full moon.

&gt; my work days are dictated to a large extent by the current Moon phaseCould you explain further?

The Moon also plays currently a very special role in my life and my work days are dictated to a large extent by the current Moon phase :)It&#x27;s not discussed in the article but we have detailed models (ROLO[0] and LIME[1]) for how much light is reflected from the Moon and can be captured by a telescope. Like this one can radiometrically calibrate a telescope, that is, find a mapping between the digital numbers coming out from the sensor and actual radiance values.[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.usgs.gov&#x2F;media&#x2F;files&#x2F;rolo-lunar-model-and-database" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.usgs.gov&#x2F;media&#x2F;files&#x2F;rolo-lunar-model-and-databa...</a>
[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;acp.copernicus.org&#x2F;articles&#x2F;24&#x2F;3649&#x2F;2024&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;acp.copernicus.org&#x2F;articles&#x2F;24&#x2F;3649&#x2F;2024&#x2F;</a>

You might also enjoy minutephysics video: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=KBcxuM-qXec" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=KBcxuM-qXec</a>

I think this category is named ciechanow.ski.

It&#x27;s hypertext - a text-based format enhanced with other elements.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;explorabl.es&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;explorabl.es&#x2F;</a> calls them &quot;Explorable Explanations&quot;.

Is there a name for this category of website? I am seeing content like this — elaborate, animated, interactive — more often here and I wonder if its part of a new corner of the internet I am not familiar with. Looks dope.

Thank you for collecting and sharing these. I was so impressed by the submission that my first thought was to find some repository that contains the samples of a similar caliber.

This is a really nice collection. Thanks for putting them together. I&#x27;m very partial to this writing style as well.I took a crack at making it slightly nicer to write this style of blog post via markdown with codeblocks you can mark to execute instead of display (and hot reload + gist rendering support)It makes the source easy to read, even on GitHub preview, etc.It&#x27;s what I&#x27;ve been using to write my recent posts.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;jasonjmcghee&#x2F;mdxish">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;jasonjmcghee&#x2F;mdxish</a>But at the end of the day, content itself and the code that powers it is more important than any framework you might use.

I&#x27;ve seen these called &quot;explorables&quot; or &quot;explorable explanations&quot; before and I really like them. I&#x27;ve been collecting notes on them here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;simonwillison.net&#x2F;tags&#x2F;explorables&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;simonwillison.net&#x2F;tags&#x2F;explorables&#x2F;</a>Here&#x27;s the website that coined the term: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;explorabl.es&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;explorabl.es&#x2F;</a>

I consider Kerbal Space Program to be the most rewarding game I have ever played. Going into this page I was already somewhat familiar with many of the concepts it presented because I had encountered them during gameplay. However, having the ability to modify parameters was very helpful for visualizing different kinds of gravity assists. The game does not provide a way to do this, so it augments my understanding massively.I agree that these interactive learning materials are incredibly promising towards actually understanding what is being presented. In other words, this is how I actually grok the concept.

Brilliant.org[1] does a good job of using explorables in their learning materials, some of the best I’ve seen in that category.That said, Ciechanowski is on another level entirely.[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;brilliant.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;brilliant.org&#x2F;</a>

I do think that explorables are useful in understanding, but man I feel overwhelmed with them. I feel like I do my t know when and where to stop. I feel less anxious with a plain PDF or similar. I guess it&#x27;s a skill issue.

&gt; I am really surprised almost no one is doubling down on something like this.I&#x27;ve thought a lot about this – every time a new one is posted. I wish we could live in a world where this is what STEM education looks like. I think that, ultimately, it&#x27;s just very high labor cost, and edtech is not known for being highly lucrative.Bartosz does these as a labor of love, and the world is better off for it.

We used to have those educational multimedia CD-ROMs back in the &#x27;90s. Look up Microsoft Encarta 97 on YouTube.

This is the future of STEM education.Well written, decently comprehensive interactive documents.I think such formats should be prioritised instead of textbooks for creating learning materials.I am really surprised almost no one is doubling down on something like this. Brilliant comes close, but its not at this level.Everyone in Edtech seems to be running towards AI gimmicks.Thank you Ciechanowski!

I’m sure it’s different for everyone but I think it would just be the unbridled enthusiasm and love for the subject that they would show, the tidal dopamine surge of all the mysteries that have been unlocked, the validation of all the mysteries that remain.  It would be amazing.

I have the same fantasy. I think it’s appealing because I imagine they’d be able to appreciate all the amazing things behind it more than most people, dead or alive.

Me too. Sometimes in big concerts I can&#x27;t help but think about what would the avg roman say if he would just appear here?&quot;Wow so many lights&quot; is the first answer I can think about right away

It really is a great shot. I always daydream of showing today&#x27;s technology to the great the great minds from centuries ago. Not sure why, but I do.

No, but i did just get a wedge so I could start tinkering with polar alignment.I also bought a Seestar S50 last year and have been having an absolute blast with it. Feels like a renaissance in astronomy is upon us.

An 11&quot; SCT is a commitment to use. Do you have it on a permanent mount?

Welcome to the hobby (even if a few years late). Pretty much everyone has the same experience as you. You buy the telescope, and then realize you need to buy a telescope for your telescope to use as a guide scope for accurate tracking for longer exposures.However, those long exposures are much more likely to get photobombed by an airplane or satellite. So you&#x27;re really better off taking shorter exposures with the highest ISO you can get away with, and then just stacking them.I have a much wider scope that I can do 30s exposures unguided before trailing starts to become noticeable. If you can get away with 15s, you&#x27;d be amazed at what you can achieve with newer sensors.Just some hints to help the disappointment at bay and maybe get you playing with the toys

Just search for local star parties in your area. Although, be willing to bend the definition of local depending on how light polluted your area is. My local is 4 hours away. Also, some colleges have viewing nights available. Even in light polluted areas, you can still see things for public viewings. They just suck for anyone wanting to image.There are tons of sites listing them, but I doubt there&#x27;s an absolute exhaustive list as it&#x27;s all self-reporting to each of the sites. Your app idea would just be another in a list of places, sort of like the xkcd app about yet another standard.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.go-astronomy.com&#x2F;star-parties.htm" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.go-astronomy.com&#x2F;star-parties.htm</a><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;skyandtelescope.org&#x2F;astronomy-resources&#x2F;annual-stargazing-events&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;skyandtelescope.org&#x2F;astronomy-resources&#x2F;annual-starg...</a>

Good God, no.Pretty much every telescope owner will happily show you the sky - after you&#x27;ve made an effort finding out where they gather, or if you just happen to walk by. The instagrammification of astronomy, with hordes of influencers rolling by without concern for the subject matter, just to insert themselves everywhere, is too horrible to consider.It&#x27;s not hard to find. Type &quot;&lt;city&gt; astronomical society&quot; into your search box. They have public websites, horribly outdated. Reach out to them, join the group, and you&#x27;re more than welcome. But may there never be &quot;an app for that&quot;

Here in the EU you can look for &quot;dark sky parks&quot; which are basically parks or areas in nature designated for night sky viewing because of the low amount of light pollution and they are great spots to meet people, I&#x27;m pretty sure you have these in the US as well. I advise bringing a red light if you have to do some walking. Another recommendation would be to see if you have any actual observatories near you, some of them have events for the public every now and then. The people in this community are some of the friendliest I ever met and love sharing their interest and enthusiasm.

Is there an information resource to find local telescope owners who give access to the public for viewing?(startup&#x2F;app idea!)

&gt; just imagine if you could see all those galaxies and nebulae with your naked eyeI think I’d wind up buying the Vision Pro if it can realistically portray seeing the world in a wider spectrum than our eyes can. I don’t want cartoonish images of objects pasted into the sky. I want to see what I would perceive if we e.g. gene therapied a few extra cones into our eyes to see more of the EM spectrum.

That’s incredible. Illustrates how incomprehensibly big galaxies really are. There’s a  thing 2.5 million light years away which still appears 4x bigger than the Moon.

&gt; turns out most of them aren&#x27;t that smallI haven&#x27;t realized Andromeda is 4x bigger than the Moon until I tried to take a picture of it<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mikkolaine.blogspot.com&#x2F;2014&#x2F;01&#x2F;size-of-deep-sky-objects-compared-to.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mikkolaine.blogspot.com&#x2F;2014&#x2F;01&#x2F;size-of-deep-sky-obj...</a>
(not my picture)

I really like that one, so sad that the framerate tanks after one or two flights. Tried all the settings on the debug menu but only reload helps as you stated in the documentation. Happens both in firefox, firefox developer without plugins and in chrome.I remember playing another moon lander 35 years ago in school on the swedish computers &quot;Compis&quot;. Was a very basic version but I still loved it, it&#x27;s something with slow heavy objects where you need to plan ahead what, when and how much you need to do.

Similarly, I came to learn some selenography writing a &quot;voxel&quot; (well, ray-casting) web game ... where you shuttle about the moon from crater base to crater base.I became kind of fascinated with the craters, names of the craters (and history of those names), the &quot;dark-side&quot; and all the wild topology there. (Although I think I have tiles for the entire Moon, you don&#x27;t have the fuel to get there.

An SCT11 should have no problem making out the rings of Saturn and maybe a band or two. But it&#x27;s not a good beginner scope. Long focal lengths are hard to manage if you don&#x27;t know what you&#x27;re doing

i have the 6&quot; celestron sct, and on a clear night this is pretty much the amount of detail i can make out directly:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;telescopes&#x2F;comments&#x2F;pmlbne&#x2F;jupiter_saturn_and_maybe_neptune&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;telescopes&#x2F;comments&#x2F;pmlbne&#x2F;jupiter_...</a>i&#x27;m sure with tracking and stacking it would be much more.

Can you see Saturn in good detail? I&#x27;m interested in picking up a telescope.

Thank you! You as well!The shadows are very much my favorite part of this kind of shot. It provides so much visual texture to the surface, showing not only how rough it is but how smooth it is. the &#x27;scar&#x27; to the bottom right (aka Alpine Valley <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Vallis_Alpes" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Vallis_Alpes</a>) is always one of my favorites.Thanks again!

What a beautiful photo! You have a good eye.I really like the way you caught the craters along the terminator, including the one at the bottom where you see sunlight on one rim and the rest is visible only because of Earthshine.The Moon is such a great subject that you can also get some nice shots with just a camera and a telephoto lens. Here are a couple of mine.Moon over Menlo: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.flickr.com&#x2F;photos&#x2F;geary&#x2F;24118398766&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.flickr.com&#x2F;photos&#x2F;geary&#x2F;24118398766&#x2F;</a>Moon, Mars, Venus: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.flickr.com&#x2F;photos&#x2F;geary&#x2F;16598905865&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.flickr.com&#x2F;photos&#x2F;geary&#x2F;16598905865&#x2F;</a>

Fantastic photo - you made me think about getting a telescope

If you got good bins try looking at Jupiter as well. Typically on a clear night you can see several of the moons.

This is great advice! It&#x27;s really amazing how much more you can see with a regular decent pair of binoculars. I treasure the memory of being able to see some of the star clusters that I could only vaguely make out with the naked eye for the first time, now I basically bring them every night walk :).

I think the problem is that I would like to have an image stabilized version of that. Even small ticks of you fingers amplify quickly into shaky images.I think instead of an eyepiece (or in addition to one) most consumer telescopes should include a usb image sensor that can screw into where the eyepiece is.

Depth perception? I would think objects as far away as the moon shouldn’t produce a meaningful difference between the left and right eye. But that does tell your brain they are far away, so perhaps that’s what you mean.

I was a kid living in Botswana when Halley passed earth.We watched it every night through binoculars.Marvelous clean air - humidity around 0%, just some dust. No light pollution (there wasn&#x27;t an electricity grid in some 100km around, just a handful of small diesel aggregates).The binoculars were more than enough to see the comet, its tail. And even get a feeling of the tail arcing in three dimensions.

Any specific binoculars you can recommend?

Some suggestions of mark&#x2F;model of binoculars good for that? With a budget of 1000$ &#x2F;€(I could stretch it a bit more if it&#x27;s worth the extra money)

Are binocular superior to monocular for that use case? I thought binocular were good for depth perception which I&#x27;d assume doesn&#x27;t matter here?

For people thinking of getting into moon gazing try binoculars first!Laying down on your back, plopping a nice pair on your eyes and just looking at the moon is a fantastic experience. Aside from much better UX, binoculars also have depth-perception which makes the visuals all that more engaging.If you have really nice clear sky in your area you can easily do that with stars and some planets as well.

Sometimes the most meaningful connections are with what’s been right in front of us all along

Why everyone is taking black and white pictures of the Moon? It&#x27;s 2024!

This is wonderful!!! Generalizing here but we really do take the moon for granted.I bought a &#x27;big ass telescope&#x27; a few years ago in an effort to bootstrap a hobby that I&#x27;d flirted with for decades but never really committed to. It&#x27;s a Celestron 11&quot; SCT and I really had no idea what I was getting into. When I think of space I think of things that are really small in the night sky, planets, galaxies, nebula...(turns out most of them aren&#x27;t *that* small and I overshot the targets I had in mind)I kept trying to photo galaxies and star clusters and all of these exotic things but had a bunch of trouble with tracking with long exposures. Out of frustration I ended up just pointing it at the boring ol&#x27; moon to at least get used to the equipment and workflows.I fell in love with Luna.The magnification of this scope really allowed me to explore the surface in a way I never had before. I got to know the &#x27;map&#x27; and suddenly related to our celestial neighbor in a whole new way. It was also the very first image I was actually not embarrassed to share - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;imgur.com&#x2F;a&#x2F;t9b1Uug" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;imgur.com&#x2F;a&#x2F;t9b1Uug</a>I since then improved my knowledge and technical skill but the month of the moon at the end of 2021 was really pretty spectacular for me.

Cheers...Chrome dev tools must have tricked me.Also nice that the author didn&#x27;t minify it. Interesting to read through.

Funnily, this JavaScript would not pass through most modern job interviews.

17.6k LOC just for one post to educate and entertain people. Beautiful.

As usual, it&#x27;s not the tech.. it&#x27;s the business model.

No React to be found (and good riddance). It&#x27;s two vanilla JavaScript files:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ciechanow.ski&#x2F;js&#x2F;base.js" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ciechanow.ski&#x2F;js&#x2F;base.js</a><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ciechanow.ski&#x2F;js&#x2F;moon.js" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ciechanow.ski&#x2F;js&#x2F;moon.js</a>

IME the reasons to have one are that you want people to comment and you want other people to write posts sometimes.

You definitely don&#x27;t need a CMS for a blog. I&#x27;d expect most HNer blogs you see here are either html files or markdown processed&#x2F;styled into html files. I bet various templating solutions are popular too, which just output html files.

This is why the internet is amazing!Awe-inspiring. Beautiful.How does the author build these pages? Looks like it is React. The entire blog must be custom built, no? Or is this built on top of an existing CMS?

I have same question. Is it simple &lt;canvas&gt;

Plain js and webgl<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ciechanow.ski&#x2F;js&#x2F;moon.js" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ciechanow.ski&#x2F;js&#x2F;moon.js</a>

Which technology or frameworks is he using? The animations and interactivity are great.

It goes way further than simple bump mapping. In terms of texture, there is a color texture and a height map, and the final rendering use real-time physically based rendering (PBR) techniques that takes into account the properties of the lunar regolith, as explained near the end of the article.Color space is taken proper care of, and for images as rendered from the Earth point of view, there is a model of the atmosphere, so that the sky looks blue during the day and the Moon looks red at the horizon.There are no pre-calculated images and only 3 photos. All the shading is done in real time using realistic models.

The very first interactive element is a great example of why ciechanow.ski is so great. Similar animations from other sources would probably limit to 28 frames and fake the image (using a simple mask). On ciechanow.ski there are hundreds(?) of frames and uses a bump map(?) to show accurate crater shadows on the moon&#x27;s surface.

years back i came across this moon-related modeling problem on stackoverflow (i&#x27;m not the original poster)[0] and it&#x27;s stuck with me that this seems like something that should have an easy solution.An HN thread about how cool the moon is seems like a good place to resurface it.But the question is this:The crescent of the moon face is tilted based and the angle of that tile depends on the viewer&#x27;s latitude on earth. Is there an equation that maps viewer latitude to the tilt of the moon crescent?[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;stackoverflow.com&#x2F;questions&#x2F;22392045&#x2F;calculating-moon-face-rotation-as-a-function-of-earth-coordinates" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;stackoverflow.com&#x2F;questions&#x2F;22392045&#x2F;calculating-moo...</a>

Think of how when the moon is in the sky at night the ground on Earth is lit up and not fully black. Same with the moon, it’s not totally dark on the night side of the moon if the Earth is in the sky from the moon’s perspective.

I often wonder if it&#x27;s just my imagination or is it really like that. I am still not sure.

I guess you alreay know this, but for reference this is caused by earthlight (light diffused and reflected by the earth): <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Earthlight_(astronomy)" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Earthlight_(astronomy)</a>Sometimes it&#x27;s clearly visible, but often I agree that it&#x27;s hard to tell if you&#x27;re imagining it or not.

There&#x27;s a short paragraph on &quot;earthshine&quot; towards the end.

One thing I&#x27;ve noticed while looking at the Moon, the &quot;dark&quot; part is lit enough to see that it&#x27;s an orb and not really being eaten by darkness.  This webpage doesn&#x27;t do that, I guess it&#x27;s from a different perspective without the earth shining on the Moon.

This cracks me up. &quot;Look at these beautiful orbital paths. Cover your eyes when it&#x27;s explaining the barycenter. Cover your eyes!&quot;

Thank you, I am going to show parts of this to my daughter!

I haven’t read the article but Bartosz articles are so good and enjoyable to read that I get excited whenever I see a new one pop up. I have already set some time aside tonight to read it with care.Bartosz if you are reading this: thank you so much for these articles. You truly are an inspiration and I can only hope one day I get to be as good a communicator as you are.

On an unrelated note, on the Sunday we had a major lunar standstill i.e. the full Moon at its highest orbit (as seen from northern hemisphere). It happens every 18.5 years.

I can&#x27;t tell you how excited I get everyone time he does a new one of these.  They have all the delight and wonder of a child&#x27;s pop-up book, but with the depth of a college text book.  Consistently one of the best things on the internet.

Related personal story:On January 6, 2023, at approximately noon, I happened to take a flight from Svolvær, Norway to Bodø, Norway, which, took me from 21.8 degrees latitude to 22.8 degrees latitude, which took me from [just inside polar night] to [just inside daytime].I saw the moon at takeoff and the sun at landing.It was an absolutely miraculous, specatular coincidence -- the latitudes I was flying over, the time, the date, the moon phase, the flight path.This flight allowed me to have a full 3D view of space -- the moon, the Earth, the sun, all within an hour.It was the first time I felt that the moon and sun weren&#x27;t just discs flying around the sky randomly, but rather that I was the one flying through space, had a 3D sense of where the moon was behind me and where the sun was peeking ahead of me, and that the Earth felt curved as I moved out of the view of the moon and into the view of the sun.My pictures and whiteboard illustration:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;imgur.com&#x2F;TYFAdoP" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;imgur.com&#x2F;TYFAdoP</a>

The moon is so interesting, easy to forget how much it affects life on Earth because we see it all the time.Like others in the thread, I have a telescope and it&#x27;s a wonderful experience pointing it skyward while it&#x27;s still light out and the moon is visible. Then I can really see all the craters and &quot;pock marks&quot; on the surface. (My telescope isn&#x27;t good enough to be able to see anything during a full moon, it all just becomes washed out.)

What an amazing exploration, from watching the sun set over moon craters in the first graphic to the simulation of how the Moon formed and the lucid explanations of tidal locking and axial precession.As with many of the author’s posts, the underlying code can be an interesting read as well: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ciechanow.ski&#x2F;js&#x2F;moon.js" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ciechanow.ski&#x2F;js&#x2F;moon.js</a>

ciechanow.ski on the frontpage? Instantly upvoted.

Bartosz Ciechanowski is a subject matter expert of everything, given enough time: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ciechanow.ski&#x2F;archives&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ciechanow.ski&#x2F;archives&#x2F;</a>. I still remember reading &#x27;Gears&#x27; and being completely blown away.

It really is a marvel. I&#x27;m grateful society has such subject matter experts, that they have the technical skills to share it, have a passion to share it, and dedicate the time and effort to do so at such a level.

&gt; If something (possibly LLM based)Whoah, hold the &quot;AI&quot; hype train there: I didn&#x27;t design it that way, but an LLM is close to the worst possible thing you could use for this.1. LLMs are incapable of real math or symbolic logic, so they aren&#x27;t able to you whether your statement is approximately-true, and they can&#x27;t tell you if it&#x27;s useful either. (Lots of planets are spherical.)2. You&#x27;re trying to communicate with literal aliens that won&#x27;t have any of that English training data the LLM draws from. They don&#x27;t have any preconceptions about a &quot;second&quot; and &quot;year&quot; being related but one is bigger, they won&#x27;t see the same colors or even have a 1:1 color sense, and they absolutely won&#x27;t be inferring that Jupiter and Saturn are connected by pantheon-naming.A lifetime exile from your entire species and culture is not something you want to leave to an LLM.

Once more extrasolar surveys are done it would be cool to see how unique we are. If something (possibly LLM based) could rate your description and see how many systems you&#x27;d have to visit to find Earth again.&quot;Eight major planets, the outer four are gas giants. Planets 2 and 3 are nearly the same size. All of the other planets, edge-to-edge, fit just inside the orbit of my planet and its moon.&quot;

There&#x27;s a collection of little facts I imagine being useful if a human got stranded somewhere in the universe and helpful aliens weren&#x27;t sure where to take you. Without books and electronics, what could you memorize that would help them search and identify Sol&#x2F;Earth in their big astral database?This is one of them, the seemingly-pure-coincidence of solar eclipses where the apparent size of the moon equals the apparent size of the sun.Ratios in general would be handy, since they would not depend on difficult-to-calibrate units: The moon is ~1&#x2F;6 times the mass of our Earth; the biggest planet Jupiter&#x2F;#5 is 2.5x the mass of all the rest and 5.2x the distance from the sun compared to Earth&#x2F;#3, etc.

I saw the domain name and thought the same thing. Always an event to see a new post of his.

There was a post earlier today about mechanical watches, of course this site was linked again.

I was just thinking about him yesterday while browsing HN, wondering when the next post would drop.

Easily one of the best sites on the internet, in my opinion

Wake up babe, new Bartosz Ciechanowski post dropped

The initial simulations might give you a slightly wrong idea about the shape of Moon&#x27;s orbit around the Sun. It doesn&#x27;t form any loops (you can see that in the later more precise simulation) and is in fact convex (this one is a bit harder to see).

My wife came with 9 telescopes in various states of disrepair.

I get this. You’ve got me wondering how to get this project Wife Approved Status

You&#x27;ll be sad to find out the company went out of business a long time ago

The one they gave me seems to vibrate when I face any direction but only when I leave the house.

Check out the North Paw Directional Anklet. It’s basically a compass that vibrates whenever you face magnetic north. From what I’ve read people seem to develop a sense of direction pretty quickly.

I built an ecliptic pathfinder in the Black Desert in Egypt a few weeks ago. It&#x27;s a piece of land art comprising three piles of rocks on the near horizon, each marking the position of sunrise (if you are stood in an approx 200 metre by 5 metre strip) for the summer solstice towards the north east, the spring and autumn equinoxes to the east and the winter solstice towards the south east.

It&#x27;s not insane in the least.  I try to always make a point of observing the ecliptic when I travel, it creates a wonderful interconnectedness to places all over the planet.  There are going to be some lovely conjunctions in the next few months that will provide a great opportunity to share this with people.  It&#x27;s actually pretty intuitive when there are 3 or 4 visible planets in a row once someone points it out.

Really excellent. Since I live in a high rise I&#x27;ve marked the cardinal directions on the floor and walls and been trying to develop a spatial intuition for the ecliptic, essentially trying to be able to easily imagine myself tilted in the northern hemisphere subtropics rotating around a sphere rotating around the sun. End goal would be an automatic intuition of where to look for the Sun, Moon, and all the visible planets. This sounds insane typing it out but its very passive and genuinely satisfying. Not being on the equator and the natural tilt of the Earth are the two factors that make this most difficult, of course.

You don&#x27;t have to, the link is at the end of the article :)

Thank you for sharing! Big fan of Bartosz&#x27;s articles and somehow didn&#x27;t think of looking him up on other platforms

Thanks for pointing this out.  Bartosz absolutely deserves some paid support for his efforts.

Does this come with the page&#x2F;code to store, or is there a good way of doing this? I looked a while back for properly archiving pages and their code but things were all in the works, maybe that&#x27;s more solved now.This kind of thing seems like a truly outstanding resource, and I&#x27;m happy to pay for it, with the desire to have this for when my kids get older.

Bartosz has a patreon where you can sponsor these works, and on it he posts very detailed explainers of why and how he created each page.The one for Moon is at <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.patreon.com&#x2F;posts&#x2F;on-moon-118130286" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.patreon.com&#x2F;posts&#x2F;on-moon-118130286</a>

Holy crap! only afew hours ago i was scraping his site and hoarding the delicious javascript. I wondered how long its been since the airfoil post and, bam! , a new article! More juicy javascript to hoard!

His blog posts are always amazing, very detailed and exceptionally visual

It is fascinating how much the Moon matters to us, yet it is largely ignored.

I&#x27;m glad to know the author and me share the same earth (and the moon)!

Without even clicking I now know what it is going to be. Single word title and lots of votes.I wonder if single word titles helps with SEO<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.google.com&#x2F;search?q=Moon" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.google.com&#x2F;search?q=Moon</a>right on front page #7 . good job

Wonderful !
Even if I am not super interested in the topic, the explanations are so clear and the animations so nice that I have admiration for the work done. Full mastery of the web medium that makes an explanation way clearer that any paper could.
Would love to work on a similar projet on economics &amp; personal finance.
Thanks for sharing !

Well, you could read his source code. He doesn&#x27;t &quot;use&quot; anything, but if you want libraries I think Processing and Three.js are popular.

Something has gone terribly wrong when such beautiful, but essentially simple interactive graphics feel like an expensive and exotic gift, rather than something readily supported by widely used editors. A decade or more ago, I would&#x27;ve turned to Flash to create something like this, but now I wouldn&#x27;t even know where to start.

I had to wait ten or fifteen minutes for a couple orbits to see if it would stick, but a little moon formed in the accretion example:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;postimg.cc&#x2F;Y4LTzLBk" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;postimg.cc&#x2F;Y4LTzLBk</a>This made me happy.

As with all of his stuff, you can click on the unit to switch it to metric

Great as usual!But I do prefer metric units.

Related: last Sunday (December 15th) was the *luna*stice - the northernmost endpoint of the moon&#x27;s 18.6 year cycle during which the rise&#x2F;set points move between north and south. On Sunday it was as far north as it gets, and for the next generation it will move slowly south and then back again.This cycle has been known to some humans for more than 3000 years, and appears to have helped structure architecture&#x2F;layout at various American locations such as Chaco Canyon (New Mexico) 1000 years ago. It takes a minimum of 3 generations to establish the cycle, which indicates something about the level of social and scientific organization in these societies.

“And still, after all this time, the Sun has never said to the Earth, &quot;You owe me.&quot; Look what happens with love like that. It lights up the sky.”― Rumi

This isn’t an exaggeration ! We get but one or two of his articles per year but they always delight the kids and big kids too.No cookie banner, no pop ups, no sponsored links or ads. Just amazing hand-crafted web content.

Can we give reference of these articles to LLMs and get them to write articles like this for educational contents and produce similar WebGL graphics code to render images. I mean, just use this style and produce educational content using AI. that might make the studies more interesting.

Ciechanowski is likely the best content producer of our time, absolutely fascinating reads. Imagine having such a person as a teacher - he could probably excite students about any scientific topic.I&#x27;d love to spend my time working on such articles when I&#x27;m retired :)

Huge fan of Bartosz. I love their posts. I saw the post link and it instantly put a smile on my face &#x27;cause I know I would love it even before opening the link and the post did not disappoint.In the 2nd graphic, they use of location to display the tiny person on the globe chef&#x27;s kiss. The attention to details is brilliant. I am 40% through with the post and I couldn&#x27;t contain my excitement to post here. This is lovely.

as a kinesthetic learner I really cannot say how invaluable the interactive widgets are, so wonderfully done.

I’ve always wondered how different human culture would be if we had multiple moons. Related: the relationship between lunar and menstrual cycles is an open question, eg see <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov&#x2F;3716780&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov&#x2F;3716780&#x2F;</a> or <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov&#x2F;articles&#x2F;PMC7840133&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov&#x2F;articles&#x2F;PMC7840133&#x2F;</a>

An order of magnitude above and below the speed of a falling object - exporting the JSON file that has its unadulterated gravitational force data. Dark matter and Newtonian mechanics are epiphenomenal modes of interlocking processes.

Mathematical Methods of Classical Mechanics by Arnold is a good introductory book.

Could anyone recommend some introductory reading on orbital math? I had an idea rolling around in my brain for a while to make a little website simulating how various mathematicians and philosophers visualized the moon&#x27;s orbit over the centuries, but I&#x27;m not great at math, lunar history, or math lunar history, so I&#x27;m curious where I&#x27;d get started on the reading.

Your journey from frustration to fascination with the moon is truly inspiring and beautifully captured!

One file? YeeshOnly kidding. Cool stuff, wish it were split up though

If you are interested in shaders, you can look at the source code. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ciechanow.ski&#x2F;js&#x2F;moon.js" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ciechanow.ski&#x2F;js&#x2F;moon.js</a>Like with all the other articles, it is straight up readable JS, with WebGL graphics, no dependencies.

The other side of the moon looks quite different to the tidally locked side we see from earth.

It’s almost all handmade. And he uses a lot of scripts to generate his scripts.

Do you know Which technology or frameworks is he using?The animations and interactivity are great. I&#x27;m really impressed.

Wow, hats off to Bartosz! He has clearly poured so much time and effort into crafting this incredible blog. Hold on, though—check out their other articles too. Each one is a gem! Let&#x27;s show some respect for his hard work—here&#x27;s his sponsor link. Go ahead and support him!<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.patreon.com&#x2F;posts&#x2F;on-moon-118130286" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.patreon.com&#x2F;posts&#x2F;on-moon-118130286</a>

I could spend a lifetime trying and still not create a web page as spectacular as this.

This is a fantastic example of why the Internet can still be a magical place

Minutephysics did a video about this: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=KBcxuM-qXec" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=KBcxuM-qXec</a>It looks like a dodecagon with rounded corners, but the video goes into more details.

One thing which isn&#x27;t clear (from the animations at least) is how moon revolves around sun.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Orbit_of_the_Moon#&#x2F;media&#x2F;File%3AMoon_trajectory1.svg" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Orbit_of_the_Moon#&#x2F;media&#x2F;Fil...</a>When looked from distance, it looks more like revolving around sun while getting effected by earth. Which is to say, th motion does not look like a spring&#x2F;spiral at all, but like a wave instead.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;physics.stackexchange.com&#x2F;questions&#x2F;266426&#x2F;what-does-the-moons-orbit-around-the-sun-look-like" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;physics.stackexchange.com&#x2F;questions&#x2F;266426&#x2F;what-does...</a>

I have worked through a significant portion of the GPS one, and I learned a lot. I didn&#x27;t do it in one go, though. Learning takes time.

Whenever these get posted I always play with it a bit, then look at the scroll bar and notice I&#x27;m about 10% through, if that. Has anyone ever read one of these to the bottom?I guess in my mind this is just entertainment. I enjoy the visuals and interactivity, and marvel at the technical implementation, but I don&#x27;t need to spend hours going through it. The only reason I would is if I actually wanted to learn this stuff, but so far nothing has come up that I need&#x2F;want to learn at that level of detail.I guess my question is, is this actually useful for education? Has anyone felt like they&#x27;ve really learnt something (ie. they could teach it to other people), after reading through one of these?

Bartosz, your website is the most beautiful, glorious thing to ever grace my browser. I’m not even sure how to put it into words, but I LOVE YOU for doing what you do. Thank you for your brilliance. Thank you for making my day every time I visit. Never change. Please, just keep on being your awesome self.

Any time I see a new article on that domain, I know I&#x27;m going to be distracted from work for an hour or so while I have a great time. Bartosz, your work is amazing.

The craters appear more distinct because the low angle of sunlight casts long shadows. Where sunlight hits more from above, shadows are minimal, making the craters less pronounced.

Very cool. Question about the interactive image at the top of the page: why do the craters appear more distinct near the boundary of the dark and bright side of the moon and kind of much less on the brigh side surface far away from the boundary?

&gt; It was also the very first image I was actually not embarrassed to share - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;imgur.com&#x2F;a&#x2F;t9b1Uug" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;imgur.com&#x2F;a&#x2F;t9b1Uug</a>I was goofing around with the ciechanowski moon model and noticed that either this image or ciechanowski&#x27;s simulation is flipped 180 (mirrored not rotated).<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ciechanow.ski&#x2F;moon&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ciechanow.ski&#x2F;moon&#x2F;</a>So I googled moon images to see which one might be flipped (it would be amazing if the ciechanowski model was inverted) but after looking at about 100 images, 90&#x2F;100 or more seem to be composites based on the same image. Not just that the moon presents the same face, but all the google results look based on literally the same image. So what if that image is flipped?On an oblique note, I assume google reports such repetitions to almost any search— I&#x27;ve noticed there&#x27;s a web dark pattern for results repetitions; see Amazon and Netflix. And AI results appear to be an obscenely amped-up repeater.I&#x27;m interested in repetitiond news too: take Google news without any personalization— how the web may create an appearance of copious information that&#x27;s actually very limited, and maybe very biased or completely wrong— e.g., Mandela Effect.For example news of U.S. foreign affairs is routinely absurdly biased and narrow, such as the new leader in Syria leading &quot;rebels&quot; as in SW rebel alliance and not noting we&#x27;ve got a $10,000,000 bounty on his head for being a terrorist.(Ask what you can do for Russia, not what Russia can do for you)I keep second-guessing my own perceptions, like I&#x27;m cherrypicking, but the effect seems rampant, where very narrow and obviously contestable views are repeated as truisms and appear as such across many outlets.I just saw a documentary called &quot;The Program&quot; which one more in and endless series of hype products about UFOs— this one tries to politicize the topic as a huge coverup a la JFK.But what seems funny to me is term UFO! It&#x27;s a fascinating term in its own right as it is used as a determinative noun based on an acronym where the key trait is &quot;unidentified&quot;. In the truest sense all studies of UFOs must reveal nothing, by definition. And they do reveal nothing. As did this documentary. You may have never noticed, but nothing is something!The moon is sort of like this: the biggest nothing in world. Does it even matter which is right (vs left vs correct) view?— I can&#x27;t be bothered to look up. Besides some guys went there and all they found was rocks. Who would have guessed?! They brought some back and they&#x27;ve been completely forgotten about and misplaced out of boredom and irrelevancy.It was more interesting when the noon could still possibly be green cheese. Now it&#x27;s just orbital mechanics— a celestial pinball machine. A giant fusion reactor pours energy out across a gradient and somehow gives rise to everything we are. (Yawn, I&#x27;m sleepy).Newton on gravity:The last clause of your second Position I like very well. Tis unconceivable that inanimate brute matter should (without the mediation of something else which is not material) operate upon &amp; affect other matter without mutual contact; as it must if gravitation in the sense of Epicurus be essential &amp; inherent in it. And this is one reason why I desired you would not ascribe innate gravity to me. That gravity should be innate inherent &amp; essential to matter so that one body may act upon another at a distance through a vacuum without the mediation of any thing else by &amp; through which their action or force {may} be conveyed from one to another is to me so great an absurdity that I beleive no man who has in philosophical matters any competent faculty of thinking can ever fall into it. Gravity must be caused by an agent acting constantly according to certain laws, but whether this agent be material or immaterial is a question I have left to the consideration of my readers.

This feels like a beautiful work of art! Great job, OP!

Some of those interactable visualizations on scale and seeing the sun&#x2F;moon&#x2F;earth rotate at the same time is the best anywhere.

Miles deep in to what seem like a subject we take for granted in everyday life.

I&#x27;m guessing it will get nowhere close to as well considered, written, and structured as what Bartosz makes himself.I don&#x27;t know how people don&#x27;t see how poor quality so much AI writing is, even when referencing good quality work.Also making effective visualizations that do a good job of illustrating a concept is not just a matter of being able to write the code.

wow.  can you imagine the amount of work that was put into this website?

Amazing interactive article. It actually gave me hope in humanity, over LLMs. I could feel the love, creativity and effort that was put into it.

Pretty cool post! I thought I knew the moon, but after your post I guess I was wrong haha

The solar system is like a mechanical clock, a timepiece.

I&#x27;ve already had the pleasure of learning from his previous post on &#x27;Sound&#x27;, and this one on the Moon is equally informative and beautiful. In the age of slop and pop-ups, it fills me with joy that there still exists on the internet such a brilliantly crafted blog that informs and educates the curious mind.