The moon was made for a calendar that I was working on. The calendar was setup so that it would also display the phases of the moon. I think I got the original pictures from the kenedy space centers website.
Recollections
February 23, 2026
I don’t recall if I realized this at the time, but on Earth, we always see the same face of the moon because of tidal locking. The animation I created shows it rotating. It’s more than likely that the satellite taking the photos was orbiting the moon for about 27 days so that Earth’s shadow would not appear at any angle while the sun was shining across the full view of the moon from the satellite’s perspective. Although this was made for a calendar displaying moon phases, the Earth’s shadow is absent from the animation, indicating it was purely a visual element.
Usually, with projects like these back in the day, much of the fun was finding the images, resizing them, creating an animation from them, adding a layer of transparency, and optimizing by reducing the color palette and reusing colors from prior frames via transparency.