azmth Luna
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An interactive Moon with the real terminator and libration driven by the clock, 46 verified landing and impact sites you can click, and the lunar orbiters we track, positioned live from NASA/JPL Horizons ephemerides. Replay the whole space age from 1958, jump to the south pole where the announced future landings are aimed, or highlight the five sites still returning laser pulses fired from Earth. Behind it: a catalog of 78 landmark Moon missions with sourced facts, photos, and the failures too. Free, no signup, no ads.
The orbiters flying on the globe right now: Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, South Korea's Danuri, India's Chandrayaan-2 orbiter, and NASA's ARTEMIS P1 and P2 pair, all positioned from NASA/JPL Horizons ephemerides refreshed twice a day. China's Queqiao-2 relay has no published ephemeris, so it appears as an approximate dashed orbit from the one public orbit determination, clearly labelled.
The narrated tour on the globe runs about 8 minutes across 12places; press Guided tour, bottom left, to hear it. This is every word of it, for reading, for screen readers, and for anyone who would rather not play audio. Every claim in it is sourced on the mission pages linked above. The voice is synthetic (ElevenLabs), and the script was written by us. The music under it is “Tranquility Base” by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com), licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 (creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), trimmed and looped for the tour.
This is the Moon as it is right now. The line between light and dark is where it really falls at this moment, and at the equator it moves about fifteen kilometres an hour, a full day here taking twenty-nine and a half of ours. Watch the edge closely and the Moon itself seems to rock, a slow wobble called libration that lets us see a little more than half of it from Earth. Every point of light on this surface is a place something from Earth arrived. Forty-six places are marked here, some of them standing for more than one spacecraft, and the Moon has kept every one.
The first of them was not a landing. It was a crash, on purpose. In September 1959 the Soviet Union's Luna 2 flew thirty-eight hours from Earth and hit the surface here, in Palus Putredinis, at more than three kilometres a second. It was the first object made by people to reach another world. Nobody has ever found exactly where it struck. The best anyone can say is somewhere within about sixty kilometres of this spot.
Six years and eleven failed landing attempts later, Luna 9 came down in the Ocean of Storms and survived. It was the first soft landing on another world, and it sent back the first photographs from the surface of the Moon. The Soviets did not release them straight away. The Jodrell Bank observatory in England intercepted the transmission, recognised it as a standard newspaper fax format, and printed the pictures before Moscow did. The exact resting place of Luna 9 is still not confirmed; two candidate sites were identified only this year, in 2026.
Tranquility Base. On the twentieth of July 1969, two people landed here and stayed for twenty-one hours and thirty-six minutes. The descent stage of their lander is still standing on this spot. The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has photographed it from above, along with the tracks of their boots, which have not moved in fifty-seven years. There is no wind to move them.
It happened six times. Twelve people walked here between 1969 and 1972, the last of them at Taurus-Littrow in December 1972. Three of the crews left small mirrors behind, and so did two Soviet rovers. Observatories on Earth still fire lasers at those mirrors today and time the reflection, which is how we know the Moon is drifting away from us by about thirty-eight millimetres a year. The one at Hadley-Apennine, left by Apollo 15, is still the main target.
The Soviet Union never landed a person here, and it is easy to forget what it did instead. In 1970 Luna 16 drilled a core, lifted off by itself, and brought a hundred and one grams of the Moon back to Earth with no one aboard. Two months later Lunokhod 1 became the first wheeled vehicle to drive on another world. Its successor, Lunokhod 2, drove about thirty-nine kilometres across this crater in 1973, a record that stood for forty-one years until a rover on Mars finally passed it.
Then, for a long time, nothing. Luna 24 drilled out the last samples in August 1976, and after that nothing landed on this surface for thirty-seven years. For nearly fourteen of them, nobody even launched a spacecraft toward the Moon. Budgets moved on. The Moon waited.
This is the far side, the half of the Moon that never faces Earth. It is not the dark side; it gets just as much sunlight as the near side. It is the radio-silent side, because the Moon itself blocks any signal home. In January 2019 China's Chang'e 4 became the first spacecraft ever to land here, in Von Kármán crater, and to manage it China first parked a relay satellite beyond the Moon to pass messages around the edge. The lander is still reported working, seven years on. Its rover, Yutu-2, drove for more than five years.
Almost everyone is now aiming at the bottom of the Moon. In August 2023 India's Chandrayaan-3 landed here, at sixty-nine degrees south, at the time the closest to the pole anything had ever landed in one piece. The reason is in the craters beyond it: floors that have not seen sunlight in over a billion years, and may hold ice. Every amber ring on this globe is a future landing aimed at the same polar ground. One of them, China's Chang'e 7, is aimed at the sunlit rim of Shackleton crater, almost at the pole itself.
Not everything here was aimed. In March 2022 a discarded rocket stage hit the far side and left something no other rocket ever has here: two craters, overlapping. For weeks the world believed it was a SpaceX rocket. It was not. The evidence points to a Chinese booster, though no agency has ever said so officially. And in August 2026 a Falcon 9 upper stage, finished with its job nineteen months earlier, drifted into the Moon near Einstein crater. Within hours, South Korea's Danuri orbiter had photographed the scar, about a kilometre from where the mathematics had said it would be. A week later the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter tilted to look, and measured a fresh crater about eighteen metres across.
Look above the surface. These are the spacecraft at the Moon whose positions are public, and they are where you see them: their positions come from NASA's ephemerides, refreshed twice a day. The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has been here since 2009. Danuri is South Korea's. The two ARTEMIS probes have been in orbit since 2011. And that dashed line is China's Queqiao-2 relay. No agency publishes where it is, so most maps leave it out. That path was worked out by a single amateur radio astronomer from his own Doppler measurements in 2024, and it is drawn here as exactly what it is: approximate.
The clock has caught up. Everything you have just seen is still there, and will be long after we are. The footprints, the mirrors, the rovers, the craters nobody meant to make. The Moon keeps everything. That is what makes a map like this possible. Thank you for taking azmth's Luna tour.
Artemis facts as of July 17, 2026; the mission catalog as of July 20, 2026.
azmth is independent and is not affiliated with or endorsed by NASA.Moon maps: NASA's Scientific Visualization Studio (LRO/LROC, LOLA). Orbiter positions: NASA/JPL Horizons. Lunokhod 1 and 2 rover tracks: LROC featured-site traverse maps, NASA/GSFC/Arizona State University.