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This Super-Accurate Lunar Globe Waxes And Wanes On Your Table

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As countries crumble, borders shift, and shorelines move, all Earth globes eventually become obsolete. You know what globe will never be out of date? This beautiful globe of the frickin' moon, which not only makes for an amazing design object, but also functions as a lamp that simulates its actual waxing and waning.

Now on Kickstarter, Moon is "the first topographically accurate lunar globe," created by product designer Oscar Lhermi and design studio Kudo. Using data pulled from the NASA Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter—which is currently in orbit around the moon—by the Institute of Planetary Research, the globe traces all the craters, ridges, and mountains that pucker and dapple the lunar surface, at 1:20 million scale.




But what really makes Moon's design special isn't just the attention to detail that was applied to its surface—it's what went into recreating its phases. Orbiting around the globe is a ring of LED lights. As the LED ring swings around the globe's base, it causes the moon to go through a month's worth of phases in as little as 30 seconds. But you can also set Moon to match the actual lunar phases happening at any given moment, slowing down the LED revolutions to a precise 29 days, 12 hours, 44 minutes and 2.80 seconds. And a cool fun fact: the globe's LED rings are actually controlled by a computer with the same amount of memory—a scant 64kb—as the computers that landed Apollo 11 on the actual moon.

Although it looks epic in images, Moon is relatively small, weighing only three pounds and standing 14 inches high. Now available for pre-order, the globe costs $427 for backers and will allegedly ship in November, 2016. That's a small price to pay for a design this cool, especially considering this is probably the closest any of us will come to touching the actual moon in our lifetimes.


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