NASA Luna
Apollo 17 and the last footprints we left on the regolith.
Fifty-two years on, Eugene Cernan's farewell remains the quietest sentence ever spoken on another world.
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Vol. XII — Nightly Almanac
The Moon,observed nightly.
Phase forecasts, mission archives, and the quiet science of how a single satellite still rules our tides, our calendars, and our imagination.
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June 13, 2026
Tonight in the Sky
Waning Crescent
Next phase in 2.2 days
Current Lunar Phase
Illumination
5%
Lunar age
27.4 days
Distance from Earth
357,543 km
Next full moon
June 30, 2026
From the Journal
Dispatches from the dark side of curiosity
Soviet Program
Luna 9 — the unmanned lander that taught us the Moon was solid.
In 1966 a small Soviet sphere bounced across Oceanus Procellarum and ended a century-old debate about lunar dust.
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Tidal Science
Why a body 384,000 kilometres away still pulls our oceans.
Gravity, resonance, and the slow widening of the day — a primer on the lunar grip we never feel directly.
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Chang'e
China's far-side rover and the radio silence of Von Karman.
Why landing on the Moon's far side required a relay satellite at L2 — and what Yutu-2 has found in the lunar crust.
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What this journal covers
Phases & Cycles
Live phase tracking, full-moon calendars, eclipse seasons.
Mission Archives
Apollo, Luna, Chang'e, Chandrayaan, SLIM, and private landers.
Earthly Effects
Tides, agriculture lore, sleep studies, and the long lunar day.
Imagery
Public-domain plates and AI reconstructions of unseen craters.
Almanac, Monthly
A letter from the observatory, every full moon.
Twelve issues a year, mailed on the night of perigee. Phase calendars, an essay, and a curated mission archive.