Lunar Atlas Live: 300 real places on the Moon in NASA LRO imagery

Lunar Atlas Live at a glance

Places

300 named lunar features from the USGS Gazetteer of Planetary Nomenclature (IAU names)

Rotation

One new place every 60 seconds; the full tour takes 5 hours and then repeats

Views

LROC wide-angle camera mosaic, LOLA + Kaguya shaded relief, LOLA colour elevation

Magnetotail

Estimated from the lunar phase (about 6 days around full Moon), accurate to roughly half a day

How to read the three views

1. Visible light (left). The LROC wide-angle camera mosaic: what the surface looks like in sunlight. Dark areas are the old lava plains called maria; bright areas are the older highlands and fresh crater rays. The image is contrast-stretched so detail shows.
2. Shaded relief (middle). Built from LRO's laser altimeter and Kaguya data and lit from the north-west, so hills, crater rims and rilles cast shadows that reveal the shape of the ground.
3. Colour elevation (right). The same terrain coloured by height: blue is low, red is high. Crater floors and basins stand out at once.

The blue ring marks the named place. The scale bar shows the real width of the view. All three are flat, top-down map views of the same square of ground.

Frequently asked questions

What is Lunar Atlas Live?

Lunar Atlas Live is a free tour of 300 named places on the Moon shown in real NASA Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) data. Every minute it switches to a new place and shows three views of it side by side, with live NOAA solar wind, Kp index and magnetotail status underneath. The same tour streams 24/7 on SpaceWeatherTracker TV.

Are these real photos of the Moon?

Yes. The left panel is the LROC wide-angle camera mosaic, built from photographs taken by the camera on NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, which has orbited the Moon since 2009. The middle and right panels are made from measurements by LRO's LOLA laser altimeter (and Japan's Kaguya data in the shaded relief): the middle is shaded relief lit from the north-west and the right colours the height of the ground, blue for low and red for high. They are flat top-down map views, not 3D renders.

Where does the imagery come from?

The map images are served by the USGS Astrogeology Science Center's Moon map service, with NASA Moon Trek tiles as a backup. Both distribute NASA LRO data (LROC, operated by Arizona State University, and LOLA). Place names and sizes come from the USGS Gazetteer of Planetary Nomenclature, which records the names approved by the International Astronomical Union.

How often does the Moon view change?

A new place appears every 60 seconds. With 300 places the full tour takes 5 hours, then starts again. The website and the YouTube stream use the same schedule, so they show the same place at the same minute.

Which places are included?

The tour includes the six Apollo landing sites, 50 maria, seas and lakes (such as Mare Tranquillitatis and Oceanus Procellarum), 141 craters (such as Tycho, Copernicus and Tsiolkovskiy), 11 large impact basins, 30 rilles, valleys and chains, 28 mountain ranges and peaks, 8 scarps, and Reiner Gamma, a magnetic swirl. Lunar landing sites of other missions are included where the IAU has named them. The full list is further down this page. Places poleward of 80 degrees latitude are left out because a flat map cannot show the poles without heavy distortion.

What is Earth's magnetotail, and is the Moon in it?

The solar wind stretches Earth's magnetic field into a long tail pointing away from the Sun. Around full Moon, the Moon crosses this magnetotail for about six days each month, and while it is inside, it is largely shielded from the solar wind. The page shows YES or NO and the Moon's age in days. This is estimated from the lunar phase, so it is accurate to roughly half a day, and it does not measure the tail itself, whose size changes with space weather.

Where do the solar wind and Kp numbers come from?

They come from NOAA's Space Weather Prediction Center (SWPC). Solar wind speed, density and the magnetic field's Bz are one-minute real-time readings from spacecraft at the L1 point, about 1.5 million km sunward of Earth. Kp is NOAA's planetary geomagnetic index on a 0 to 9 scale, updated every three hours. Each value is shown with the time NOAA observed it, and a solar wind or Bz reading older than 30 minutes, or a Kp value older than about three hours, is marked STALE. If NOAA cannot be reached the page says so instead of showing zeros.

Why show space weather next to the Moon?

The Moon has almost no atmosphere and no global magnetic field, so the solar wind hits its surface directly, except when it is inside Earth's magnetotail. Seeing the live solar wind and Kp next to the lunar surface connects what the Sun is doing now to the world it is blowing on. It is also the same data used for aurora forecasts on this site.

Can I use the images?

The imagery is NASA and USGS public-domain data. Credit line used on every frame: Lunar imagery: NASA/GSFC/Arizona State University - LROC, Topography: NASA LOLA, Map tiles via NASA Trek & USGS Astrogeology - Public Domain. The page layout, the selection of places and the live footer are by SpaceWeatherTracker.

Where can I watch it on TV or YouTube?

Open SpaceWeatherTracker TV and choose channel 3, Lunar Atlas Live. The same tour is also composed in 4K for the 24/7 YouTube stream.

All 300 places on the tour

Names, positions and sizes are from the USGS Gazetteer of Planetary Nomenclature. Sizes are the diameters in kilometres listed by the gazetteer.

Data sources and methodology

• NASA Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) — the spacecraft that collected the data
• LROC, Arizona State University — wide-angle and narrow-angle camera mosaics
• USGS Astrogeology Science Center: Moon maps — Moon map service used for the images
• NASA Moon Trek — backup tiles
• USGS Gazetteer of Planetary Nomenclature (Moon) — names, positions and sizes of every place
• NOAA Space Weather Prediction Center — solar wind, magnetic field and Kp

Each map view is a square window about 2.6 times the width of the feature (90 to 3,600 km across), centred on its IAU position. Solar wind and Kp values are shown exactly as NOAA reports them, with NOAA's own observation time; nothing is estimated or filled in. The magnetotail status is a calculation from the lunar phase and is labelled approximate. The place list is also available as JSON at /api/public/lunar-features?all=1.