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.

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

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.

From the about page... https://asciimoon.com/about/

> ASCIIMoon is a small web app that tracks the moon's phases and uses ASCII art to create a basic visual representation of the moon's current appearance based on light percentage.

> This is a personal project, and is in no way a precise representation.

https://www.moongiant.com/phase/today/ is what it should look like. The moon for July 2nd should be something that is a half circle illuminated and a half circle in the dark.

The image on asciimoon shows a circle occluding the moon where it appears that the circle occluding the moon's edge is at 50%.

I'd have to sit down and do the math, but there is way more than 51.79% illuminated in today's rendering.

While I recognize that this is a personal project and not a precise representation... it has a fair amount of work to do to make it so that the correct percentage is illuminated.

This does have some interesting JavaScript and css tricks... but it needs some more math done.

It seems misleading to say that this is "rendered in ASCII art"... more like the phase is being rendered, and it has an ASCII art moon background. If I copy and paste the moon text into a text editor, the phase is gone, so it's not actually part of the text.

And as others have pointed out, phases don't work like that.

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.

Reminds me of ACME phoon ... I used to have this in my .bashrc ;) https://acme.com/software/phoon/

Seeing the shadow whip across from the css animation rule when going between waxing and waning gibus is real janky looking.

I made a moon phase with javascript and SVG once https://github.com/tingletech/moon-phase

I think this is my most popular repo on github.

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.

Besides from usual solutions like phoon, there is a winning IOCCC entry that exactly does this: https://github.com/ioccc-src/winner/blob/master/2000/natori/...

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.

The astronomical criticism here is warranted. But where are the usual defenders of "art" here to take arms for this project's interpretation of "ASCII Art"?

It looks cool and I imagine it wasn't easy to do. And the color of the moon changes when you reload the page.

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.

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....

A gibbous moon shouldn't look like it had a bite taken out of it

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?

`phoon' exists

Nice start, but it doesn't look or feel right somehow. Keep improving bit by bit. :thumbs up emoji:

we do we need a web site for an ASCII art display? I just want a command I can locally can in my terminal. And if I want it online, just a telnet server ;-)

this may help https://raku.land/zef:librasteve/Moonphase

I really wish this had libration and a way to watch it animate through the phases.

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?

I was really hoping this would have been a CLI command

Nice!

You can also use xphoon(6) on Linux/*BSD to show a kind of ASCII moon on your root window.

Could use an ANSI version!

Is it just me, or is the site not working right now? It loads, but it doesn't show the date, and the buttons don't seem to change anything...

That's absolutely beautiful!

Now we need "console moon". I type "moon" in my console, out comes the moon phase with the ascii art.

very cool

What the heck is the shape of that moon. It's completely wrong.

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Cool project!

Man this is a tough crowd to impress! (yeah I know it's off but still).