Welcome to the Real Time Map of the Moon! This website provides photorealistic images of the Moon at hourly intervals throughout the year along with maps giving the names of craters and other lunar features. The images are rendered at 4K resolution using an LROC digital elevation model of the Moon provided by NASA's Scientific Visualization Studio (SVS). The images have an equivalent resolution of 0.6 arcseconds/pixel. The POV-Ray raytracer is used to render images of the Moon with the correct libration state and solar illumination at a given time.
This site provides a relatively low bandwidth and mobile phone friendly web application that allows a lunar observer looking through their telescope to quickly download a detailed annotated image of the Moon and zoom in to any region (I use pinch to zoom on my phone). An observer can quickly identify the lunar features they're seeing in the eyepiece or in their photographs.
This project is largely inspired by NASA's Scientific Visualization Studio's (SVS) annual website.