Moon Service

What It Is

An anonymous city lookup for Moon photography opportunities. Enter a city or town to see ranked windows with Moon position, light, weather, score, and caveats in one place.

Why It Exists

Planning a Moon photo usually means checking ephemeris data, twilight, weather, and timing separately. Moon Service combines those signals into a quick first pass so you can decide whether a night or morning is worth scouting.

Current Boundaries

• No account, email, cookies, or saved server-side user profile is required.
• City or town searches are enough; exact home addresses are not needed.
• Forecasts and scores are decision support, not a guarantee of clear skies or a usable horizon.
• Local hills, buildings, trees, and other horizon obstructions are not modelled yet.

Privacy and Provider Processing

• Moon Service does not require an account, email, cookies, or a saved server-side user profile. Recent searches stay in this browser. Moon Service does not permanently store a location just because you search for it.
• Moon altitude, availability, included and blocked compass sectors, selected Moon shapes, bright-limb orientation, and a non-default weather-ranking choice are stored in this browser.
• Each search with active hard limits or a non-default weather-ranking choice sends them to the Moon Service server for that search only. The server does not permanently store them or put them in a server-side profile, cookie, URL, log, analytics event, or shared cache.
• Share links include the location and may include the selected order, but never include preferences. A browser opening the link applies its own saved preferences, if any.
• If calibration feedback is enabled and you submit a report, Moon Service retains its city-level location and opportunity context until an operator deletes the report.
• Moon Service sends city queries and forecast coordinates from its backend to Open-Meteo. Open-Meteo receives the backend address and request data rather than a direct browser request. Its free API may keep backend request logs containing coordinates for up to 90 days. Moon Service adds no visitor tracking.
• Open-Meteo uses GeoNames data for city lookup. GeoNames supplies the location dataset; the browser does not send the search directly to GeoNames.

Data Sources and Service Limits

• Weather data by Open-Meteo (licence and terms). Location data is based on GeoNames.
• The free Open-Meteo API is rate-limited and has no uptime guarantee. Forecasts can change. Moon Service scores are decision support, not a promise of clear weather or an unobstructed view.

Data and Imagery

The Moon surface texture is derived from the NASA SVS CGI Moon Kit. Credit: NASA's Scientific Visualization Studio. NASA also explains how to photograph the Moon.