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Moonlight (Clair de Lune)

  • Released Friday, July 20, 2018
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Set to Claude Debussy's Clair de Lune, this visualization uses Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter data to show the stark beauty of evolving light and shadow near sunrise and sunset on the rugged lunar surface. Music performed by Timothy Michael Hammond, distributed by Killer Tracks.

This video is also on the NASA Goddard YouTube channel at both 720p (HD) and 2160p (UHD or 4K).

This visualization attempts to capture the mood of Claude Debussy's best-known composition, Clair de Lune (moonlight in French). The piece was published in 1905 as the third of four movements in the composer's Suite Bergamasque, and unlike the other parts of this work, Clair is quiet, contemplative, and slightly melancholy, evoking the feeling of a solitary walk through a moonlit garden.

The visuals were composed like a nature documentary, with clean cuts and a mostly stationary virtual camera. The viewer follows the Sun throughout a lunar day, seeing sunrises and then sunsets over prominent features on the Moon. The sprawling ray system surrounding Copernicus crater, for example, is revealed beneath receding shadows at sunrise and later slips back into darkness as night encroaches.

The visualization was created to accompany a performance of Clair de Lune by the National Symphony Orchestra Pops, led by conductor Emil de Cou, at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, DC, on June 1 and 2, 2018, as part of a celebration of NASA's 60th anniversary.

The visualization uses a digital 3D model of the Moon built from Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter global elevation maps and image mosaics. The lighting is derived from actual Sun angles during lunar days in 2018.

Scene 1. Waxing crescent Moon.

Scene 2. Theophilus, Cyrillus, Catharina craters (north to south and youngest to oldest), sunrise.

Scene 3. Apennine and Caucasus mountain ranges, sunrise.

Scene 4. Copernicus crater, sunrise.

Scene 5. Aristarchus plateau at sunrise, featuring the bright Aristarchus crater and a number of prominent rilles.

Scene 6. Orientale basin at sunrise.

Scene 7. Schrödinger basin, a large crater near the south pole on the lunar far side.

Scene 8. The lunar far side.

Scene 9. The north pole.

Scene 10. Cyrillus and surrounding craters at sunset.

Scene 11. Apennine and Caucasus mountains at sunset.

Scene 12. Copernicus crater at sunset.

Scene 13. Aristarchus plateau at sunset.

Scene 14. Waning crescent Moon.

For More Information

See NASA.gov

Credits

Please give credit for this item to:
NASA's Scientific Visualization Studio

This page was originally published on Friday, July 20, 2018.
This page was last updated on Wednesday, October 9, 2024 at 12:08 AM EDT.

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