This tour of the Moon was developed by NASA from images and maps obtained from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter mission. To best experience the combined effects of the music and the images, view in full screen mode and imagine you are lying on your back in a grassy field at night looking up at the moon through a pair of super magnifying glasses.

You would notice the multitude of impact craters that pockmark the surface of the Moon. The reason those craters have persisted for up to 4.5 billion years is because the Moon has no atmosphere and therefore no rain, no snow, no ice, no running water, no wind, nor any of the other weathering and erosion agents present on Earth, including recycling of the Earth's crust owing to plate tectonics. The Moon also has no life, which provides the vegetative cover that tends to hide (along with the oceans) much of the evidence for any craters that have persisted in some form on Earth (for an exception, see Meteor Crater in Arizona). If the Earth had no atmosphere and no plate tectonics, it's surface would look very similar to the Moon's. Makes one appreciate and want to protect the very thin (60-miles thick) layer of air that blankets our planet.

Here is the narrative that accompanies the video ...

"This visualization attempts to capture the mood of Claude Debussy's best-known composition, Clair de Lune (moonlight in French).

The visuals were composed like a nature documentary, with clean cuts and a mostly stationary virtual camera. The viewer follows the Sun throughout a lunar day, seeing sunrises and then sunsets over prominent features on the Moon. The sprawling ray system surrounding Copernicus crater, for example, is revealed beneath receding shadows at sunrise and later slips back into darkness as night encroaches.

The visualization was created to accompany a performance of Clair de Lune by the National Symphony Orchestra Pops, led by conductor Emil de Cou, at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, DC, on June 1 and 2, 2018, as part of a celebration of NASA's 60th anniversary.

The visualization uses a digital 3D model of the Moon built from Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter global elevation maps and image mosaics. The lighting is derived from actual Sun angles during lunar days in 2018.

This video is public domain and along with other supporting visualizations can be downloaded from the Scientific Visualization Studio at: Moonlight."