Crater Tap
The banner names a feature on the Moon. You have one tap to find it. Each round changes the lunar phase so your target sits right on the terminator, where it casts the longest shadow — just like at the eyepiece.
What you'll do
A rendered Moon fills the canvas under realistic terminator lighting. Above it, the banner names a feature — a crater, mare, mountain range, or rille. Tap where you think it is. The game measures the great-circle distance from your tap to the centre of the feature and awards points: a direct hit on the rim is worth more than a near-miss, a wild click is worth nothing.
What it trains
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Lunar geography — which mare is which, where the famous craters sit, and how the major features hang together. The kind of knowledge that turns a casual scan into a tour.
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Reading the terminator — the sun-line at the eyepiece is your friend. Long shadows pop the features out of the surface. The game spawns each target near that line on purpose.
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Phase awareness — not every feature is visible every night. Mare Crisium catches the first sunlight after new Moon; Grimaldi waits until two days before full. The game makes that schedule physical.
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Eyepiece prep — you can stop hunting the moon for "that big crater I half-remember" and go to it deliberately.
How to prepare
1. Walk the Moon page. Open /Moon and explore the labelled feature map. Hover the major maria, click into a few craters — the names start to stick when you've seen each one a couple of times.
2. Run Practice first. Practice is untimed, ten rounds, and pulls features from the full nearside (including the harder ones). It's the right place to learn the names without a clock breathing on you.
3. Watch the terminator under your own scope. Five minutes at the eyepiece on a half-Moon evening builds geography no game can replace. The game makes the next session faster.
Two modes: Practice and Compete
- Practice — untimed, ten rounds drawn from the full feature pool. You can Skip any round you don't recognise. No leaderboard.
- Compete — 90 seconds on the clock, as many rounds as you can fit. Each correctly-placed tap adds points; the game pulls from a curated pool weighted toward the better-known features. Best run per player goes on the leaderboard.
Switching modes restarts the run. Compete only counts when you press Start the clock on the confirmation dialog — that's your "go" moment.
How to play
- Read the banner — it names the feature for this round.
- Tap where it is — once. The result panel tells you how close you were.
- Scoring — tap inside the feature's rim: +2 direct hit. Tap within tolerance (a generous halo around it): +1 close. Miss: 0.
- Phase — the sub-solar longitude shifts each round so the target sits about 5° into sunlight, just past the terminator. Long shadows by design.
- Skip — if you have no idea where the feature is, skip it (Practice only) and move on.
Tips
- Anchor first, then aim. Find Mare Imbrium or Mare Tranquillitatis in a glance, then place the target relative to it.
- Use the terminator. The feature is by design close to it — if you find yourself clicking deep in the bright half or far into the shadow, you're wrong.
- Small craters near big maria are easier than they look once you know the neighbourhood: Copernicus rides the southern edge of Imbrium, Tycho is the rayed crater near the southern limb.
- Don't sprint in Compete — a 0-point click is 100% wasted time. Two careful taps beat five panicked ones.
Ninety seconds, a Moon, your finger.
