MES Moon
Live sky dashboard: moon phase, sun, planets and astronomy.
Pick the data points and their order, then press Copy row and paste into a spreadsheet: every value lands in its own cell. Your choice is remembered on this device.
The Moon in your own sky, weather-report style: phase, where it is now, rise and set, the best time to look tonight (with the cloud cover from the conditions below) and the next phases. Computed on your device with Astronomy Engine.
Computing…
If the Moon had a weather report: pick a landing site or crater (or click anywhere on the globe) to see how hot or cold the ground is there right now, when the Sun next rises or sets (in Earth days), whether Earth is in the sky, and what you would weigh. The Moon has no air, so there is no wind, rain or blue sky, and its days and nights each last about two Earth weeks: that is why the ground swings from about +120 °C at noon to about −180 °C before dawn.
Loading the Moon weather…
Where the Sun and Earth are overhead on the Moon comes from Astronomy Engine (the IAU rotation model of the Moon). Temperatures are a model, not live measurements (no instrument reports the Moon's temperature in real time): in sunlight the ground balances the sunshine it absorbs, scaled so the equator at noon is 392 K (about 119 °C), and at night it cools quickly and then slowly to about 95 K (−178 °C) at the equator before dawn, colder towards the poles. That matches the global maps from NASA's Diviner radiometer on the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (Williams et al. 2017, Vasavada et al. 2012) to within roughly 10-20 °C; real slopes, crater shadows and rocks make the actual ground patchier. Permanently shadowed crater floors use fixed values from Diviner (Paige et al. 2010; Hermite crater about 26 K). Other figures: gravity 1.62 m/s² (NASA Moon fact sheet); radiation 1,369 µSv per day measured by Chang'e 4 (Zhang et al. 2020); water in Cabeus crater (Colaprete et al. 2010, LCROSS); about 12,500 moonquakes recorded by the Apollo seismometers (NASA); Earth's temperature records from the WMO archive. Your local temperature is the same Open-Meteo reading shown in Conditions below.
Rise and set times for the chosen location's local calendar day. Compare with weather.com.
| Temperature now | — |
|---|---|
| Temperature at 9 AM local | — |
| Sunrise | — |
| Sunset | — |
| Sun duration (daylight) | — |
| Moonrise | — |
| Moonset | — |
| Moon duration (above horizon) | — |
| Moon phase | — |
Temperature: Open-Meteo forecast. Rise / set / phase: computed with Astronomy Engine.
“9 AM” rows are for 9 AM local; the daily high/low, UV and rain chance cover the whole day. Forecast from Open-Meteo; air quality from the Copernicus (CAMS) model via Open-Meteo.
| Now | — |
|---|---|
| Today's high / low | — |
| Feels like (9 AM) | — |
| Humidity (9 AM) | — |
| Wind (9 AM) | — |
| Cloud cover (now) | — |
| Max UV index today | — |
| Chance of rain today | — |
| Pressure (now) | — |
| Air quality — US AQI | — |
|---|---|
| European AQI | — |
| PM2.5 / PM10 | — |
| Ozone (O₃) | — |
| Nitrogen dioxide (NO₂) | — |
How high the Sun (solid) and Moon (dashed) climb above the horizon over the local day. The shaded band is below the horizon; the vertical line marks now.
Apparent geocentric coordinates for the moment shown above (the same from anywhere on Earth). Compare with theskylive.com/sun-info.
| Constellation | — |
|---|---|
| Distance from Earth | — |
| Distance from Earth (AU) | — |
| Right Ascension | — |
| Declination | — |
| Magnitude | — |
The Sun's apparent declination (orange, left axis) and right ascension (blue, right axis) across the year. Declination swings ±23.4° between the solstices and is 0° at the equinoxes — that tilt is what gives us seasons. The four dotted verticals mark this year's equinoxes and solstices; see Reading the Sky below for what declination and right ascension mean.
Apparent geocentric coordinates for the moment shown above. Compare with theskylive.com/moon-info.
| Constellation | — |
|---|---|
| Illumination | — |
| Distance from Earth | — |
| Distance from Earth (AU) | — |
| Right Ascension | — |
| Declination | — |
| Magnitude | — |
Where the Moon is on its orbit today, and where Earth and the other planets are around the Sun. Press Play to watch time pass, or open the full Solar System Today for every planet, any date, eclipses and more. (Ctrl + scroll to zoom.)
External pages that also update in real time — handy for planning what to observe tonight.
A short primer on the two numbers used all over this page (and by Wikipedia, TheSkyLive and every star atlas).
Picture the sky as a giant globe with Earth at the centre. Just as places on Earth are pinned down by latitude and longitude, points on that sky-globe are pinned down by declination and right ascension — a grid that is fixed to the stars, not to the spinning Earth.
On this page the Sun and Moon rows list their current apparent RA and Dec; the constellation is just whichever star pattern that RA/Dec falls inside.
The Sun and Moon figures, the Moon-phase drawing and both charts are computed on your device with Astronomy Engine (an offline astronomy library). Place search and time-zone lookup use Open-Meteo's geocoding API; conditions come from Open-Meteo's forecast and air quality from its Copernicus (CAMS) feed. Choosing “Use my location” shares your coordinates with Open-Meteo for those lookups only — nothing is stored off your device. Values may differ by up to a minute (rise / set) or a degree or two (temperature) from weather.com and TheSkyLive, which use their own models.