[HN Gopher] ASCIIMoon: The moon's phase live in ASCII art
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ASCIIMoon: The moon's phase live in ASCII art
Author : zayat
Score : 93 points
Date : 2025-07-01 10:53 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (asciimoon.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (asciimoon.com)
| treve wrote:
| Could use an ANSI version!
| bombcar wrote:
| and available over telnet!
| julienchastang wrote:
| That _would_ be cool!
| flymasterv wrote:
| https://wttr.in/Moon
| _joel wrote:
| curl https://wttr.in/Moon
| supportengineer wrote:
| finger moon@hostname
| _aavaa_ wrote:
| While cool it's a bit of a cop out to use a bitmap as a mask for
| both the circular shape and the shading of the earth's shadow.
| emptybits wrote:
| I agree. And if you copy and paste the ASCII moon they have
| there, it does already have a perfectly good circular shape to
| it. Well done.
|
| It's ASCII art. Drop the bitmap mask.
| ludicrousdispla wrote:
| Lunar phase should be showing the moon's shadow (on itself)
| which will not be circular from our perspective on Earth except
| during the new moon phase.
|
| This looks more like what is seen during a solar eclipse.
| eichin wrote:
| Yeah, this rendering is Just Wrong - moon phase is viewing a
| half-lit sphere from different angles, no external shadows
| are involved. Maybe look at https://github.com/chubin/pyphoon
| instead, which claims a history including Jef Poskanzer code
| going back to the 1970s...
| way_stone wrote:
| If "live in ASCII art" is the pitch, it's reasonable to expect
| ASCII itself being the part that is "live".
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Very cool.
|
| I want the shadow that progresses across the moon to match
| reality. A crescent shape that always goes through the north and
| south poles -- that flattens as it approaches a quarter moon....
| wompapumpum wrote:
| very cool
| absurdwebsite wrote:
| Cool project!
| p1mrx wrote:
| The current shadow looks physically impossible... or it would
| only be possible during a lunar eclipse.
|
| At least there are no stars in the shadow, so they get partial
| credit.
| omoikane wrote:
| See also: https://xkcd.com/1738/
| divbzero wrote:
| Also not possible: common representations of the star and
| crescent.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_and_crescent#Contemporary.
| ..
| spicybright wrote:
| Seeing the shadow whip across from the css animation rule when
| going between waxing and waning gibus is real janky looking.
| D___R___ wrote:
| I remember going to a planetarium as a kid and seeing a booth
| where you could "buy land" on the Moon (or any other planet) and
| get a fancy certificate to prove it This project totally brings
| back that kind of charm, but with a digital twist.
|
| It took me straight back to childhood.
| supportengineer wrote:
| That's absolutely beautiful!
| dandrino_ wrote:
| A gibbous moon shouldn't look like it had a bite taken out of it
| bainganbharta wrote:
| `phoon' exists
| jpecar wrote:
| Reminds me of ACME phoon ... I used to have this in my .bashrc ;)
| https://acme.com/software/phoon/
| SlowTao wrote:
| While I love the ASCII art, yeah... thats not how the moon phase
| works. At half moon it should be exactly half occluded, so like
| it was cut in half, not just a weird circle cut out.
|
| This is something that partially bothered me about GTA San
| Andreas on Ps2. They used the same trick as here but I would give
| them a pass because it was just a small detail on a large
| simulation on an already very limited system.
|
| There are some great bones here on the site, just need to tweak
| the shadow and it can be a 10 out of 10.
| kingstnap wrote:
| Yeah they seem to have drawn it as a dark circle going across
| for some reason.
|
| But earth's shadows aren't what create moon phases IRL. The
| real moon phases are from the sun lighting the moon from
| different angles so this is just super weird.
| echelon wrote:
| That's a great suggestion for a more accurate render, but I
| want the author to know that I still think they did an amazing
| job. It's fun and it looks great. (Your feedback was really
| constructive, and I don't think the author will misinterpret
| it. Some of the other commenters here, on the other hand...)
|
| I have two additional feature requests:
|
| 1. Persistent URLs (replaceState)
|
| 2. Lunar eclipses
| layer8 wrote:
| The match between the ASCII part and the clipping circle breaks
| when zooming out too much on a desktop browser.
|
| Also, given sufficient character "resolution", ASCII art
| approximates pixel art. This isn't very far from it, with (on my
| screen) characters of 3x7 pixels. And would require a 200x78
| character terminal to fully display.
| wang_li wrote:
| Two observations.
|
| First, there comes a point when it's not ascii art, it's just
| dithering. The use of different colors for the characters goes
| even further from ascii art.
|
| Second, opening this on my iPad results in a moon with a black
| crescent on the bottom and an oddly shaped dark green crescent on
| the left. What star system is this moon in?
| Nition wrote:
| This looks really nice (apart from the shape of the gibbous moon,
| but others have already pointed that out).
|
| Could you possibly detect the user's approximate location and
| rotate the whole thing 180 degrees if they're in the southern
| hemisphere? Down here, the moon looks technically the same, but
| it's 180 degrees* rotated because we're standing upside-down when
| we look at it. The craters are flipped and the light comes from
| the opposite side.
|
| *Actually it's only rotated a full 180 degrees at opposite poles,
| and the exact rotation depends on your latitude. But perfect is
| the enemy of good etc.
| divbzero wrote:
| Why is the bottom edge of the ASCII moon a black crescent? Is
| that a real lunar phenomenon or just a rendering artifact in my
| browser?
| thot_experiment wrote:
| I feel like ascii art loses something when it's not sized to a
| standard text mode (at least to width, like 132x132 is fine). At
| some point you're just using weird pixels and this is approaching
| that for me. Same goes for changing the color of the characters
| continuously, terminal colors are cool. I'm probably just a crazy
| purist
| aylons wrote:
| It's not even just that: the shadows go mid-character, instead
| of using characters as pixels. It is just not ASCII ART at all,
| just some ASCII characters used as a filler.
| CommenterPerson wrote:
| Man this is a tough crowd to impress! (yeah I know it's off but
| still).
| 867-5309 wrote:
| there's no cow jumping over it. author's notepad.exe licence
| should be revoked
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(page generated 2025-07-02 23:00 UTC)