LunarPhase

Editors' ReviewDownload.com staffFebruary 18, 2002Unlike some of its rivals, LunarPhase doesn't offer a list of home locations. Instead, you have to manually fill in the GMT time zone, longitude, and latitude of your city. The brushed-metal interface looks great, but you can't move or resize the window. The tool tips display too slowly. Once we started exploring the program, though, we forgave these flaws. You can view information on any day in the current month by clicking the date, as in any calendar program. What's even cooler is that you can click into the month or date field and change those parameters, too. Thus we learned that when man was first walking on the moon on July 20, 1969, a waxing crescent shone on San Francisco. A lunar eclipse calculator tells you when the next eclipses will occur, whether it's total, and whether it will be visible from your home location. The program provides a database of lunar features, although only experts will be able to make sense of the lunar coordinates. The trial version lets you use the program up to 100 times during 30 days. Moonstruck amateur astronomers will enjoy LunarPhase.