A number of people have asked me about the little moon widget you can see at the foot of this blog, which shows the phases of the moon in real-time. In fact, the image is generated by the U.S. Navy's Time Service Department.

These lunar phase images were created by R. Schmidt from ray-traced images of the Moon. A Clementine spacecraft mosaic of the lunar surface was mapped onto a sphere, and scenes were rendered as a virtual Sun "orbited" the Moon. The depiction of lunar surface features suffers geometric distortion but the terminator is correct with respect to the spherical Moon.

If you want to put the moon on your blog, just use this code, changing the height and width to suit:

<a href="http://tycho.usno.navy.mil/"> <img src="http://tycho.usno.navy.mil/cgi-bin/phase.gif" width="120" height="120" /> </a>

Now what we need is an HD desktop version to go with my DesktopEarth...