talshiarr

Yeah, it seems to be just a static image. There's no rotation from rising to setting, either. It sets in the same orientation. And I know what you mean with things being bizarre in other places. I haven't been in the southern hemisphere, but was in Hawaii in winter when the full moon was far enough north in declination to actually appear in the northern half of the sky at midnight. Seeing it upside down from there was very odd indeed!

I took a look in game and compared to Stellarium, and it doesn't appear that the game takes lunar parallax into account, which is about the equivalent of two moon widths at maximum comparing its position against the background stars from one location and another. It also doesn't orient the moon properly in the southern hemisphere. Taking off from Punta Arenas on December 1 with a full moon rising, the moon is in the same rotational orientation that you'd see from the northern hemisphere with the "face" upright. Without looking more deeply I'd guess that their calculation of the moon and sun's position is done using a greatly simplified method using the centers of the each body as the location. This method is certainly good enough for casual visual use, but breaks down when any semblance of accuracy is needed.

Hey there, I rarely post but do know a little about how eclipses are calculated and it's not a trivial matter to calculate the position of the sun and moon accurately enough to make for a truly realistic solar eclipse experience. At least probably not in real-time at 30-60 fps when so many other factors are fighting for processing power as well. I'm impressed it shows as much as it does, to be honest. Software like Stellarium uses either the French VSOP ephemeris, or for extreme long-term accuracy JPL ephemeris tables that calculate the orbit of the moon using vast numbers of periodic terms. The path of totality is so narrow and the duration so short it requires thousands of terms for the position of the Earth and Moon relative to the sun to be correct at any location.