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....
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.
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.
This is also the standard way to present moon phases in watch complications:
> One of the objections raised to a conventional moonphase display, which shows the visible part of the Moon via an aperture in the dial, is that it is not an accurate representation of what you see when you actually look at the Moon over the course of a month.
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.
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?
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.
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
And it's within a circular mask. Half the challenge of ASCII art is creating the illusion of smooth curves and edges when you mostly just have blocky letters. There's barely any attempt at smoothing the edges at all.
> 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.
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[ 2.3 ms ] story [ 67.1 ms ] threadI 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....
At least there are no stars in the shadow, so they get partial credit.
It took me straight back to childhood.
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.
> One of the objections raised to a conventional moonphase display, which shows the visible part of the Moon via an aperture in the dial, is that it is not an accurate representation of what you see when you actually look at the Moon over the course of a month.
https://www.hodinkee.com/articles/the-beautifully-pointless-...
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.
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?
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.
https://www.roysac.com/tutorial/rowanasciiarttutorial.html
> 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.