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Behold the Glory of NASA’s Data-Rich 2016 Lunar Calendar Videos

One frame = one hour in NASA’s comprehensive new visual series on the Moon.
Image: NASA.

2015 has been a spectacular year for Moon-watching. From straight-up lunar photobombs, to the extremely rare supermoon lunar eclipse in September, to the upcoming Christmas Full Moon—the first since 1977—our trusty satellite has been extra generous with money shots.

Fortunately, NASA has opted to keep the lunar love flowing into the New Year with its newly released series of the entire 2016 lunar calendar. The intricate visualizations, released in 4K resolution, are based on imagery acquired by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), which has been studying the Moon up close since its launch in 2009.

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To get a sense of how much data is compressed into the series, check out this comprehensive overview of the Moon's 2016 phases from the perspective of the Northern Hemisphere, in which every frame represents one hour.

Moon Phases 2016, Northern Hemisphere. Video: NASA Goddard/YouTube

It's obvious that a meticulous attention to detail and modeling went into these visualizations, which were compiled by NASA media specialist Ernie Wright. There are even minutely labeled surface features that show up along the shadowy terminator line on the simulated Moon's surface as it passes through its phases.

The video also includes an animation of the Moon's orbit around the Earth on the top left corner, while the bottom left diagram shows how the Moon is positioned relative to the Sun and the Earth. There's a line on the middle right section of the video displaying the Moon's true-scale distance from the Earth, as well as an info-heavy stat tracker in the bottom corner.

All of these components are beautifully synced up to the main image of the lunar phase changes, and rounded out with some dreamy space music courtesy of composer Mark Petrie. Here's the Southern Hemisphere version, for sub-equatorial Moon fans.

Moon Phases 2016, Southern Hemisphere. Video: NASA Goddard/YouTube

NASA has put together a page of animations plotting out each part of the cycles displayed in the scientific visualizations, in case you want to take a look at each process individually. The scale model of the Earth and the Moon's orbital dance is particularly illuminating—given how large our satellite can loom in our skies, it's easy to forget how far away it really is from us.

What's more, the site also includes a tool called Dial-A-Moon where users can input a 2016 date to receive an image of the Moon's phase that day, coupled with a bunch of stats. I entered in my birthday next summer: it will be at a distance of about 396,555 kilometers from Earth with a position angle of 4.231° and a phase percentage of 90.8, which translates to a waxing gibbous. Useful specs for party prep.

This new series of visualizations is a testament to how much more accurate our measurements of the Moon have become in light of projects like LRO. It's also a reminder that while humans have been precisely predicting and monitoring lunar phases for thousands of years, there is much more variation and tumult to its cycles than meets the naked eye.