pyphoon

pyphoon is a small command-line program that renders the current Moon phase as detailed ASCII art directly in your terminal. It computes lunar ephemerides for a given date and location, then maps the illuminated portion onto characters to approximate shading with surprising fidelity. The tool supports showing past or future phases, so you can visualize how the Moon will look on specific dates without opening a browser or an app. It’s intentionally minimal: no GUI, no heavy dependencies, just a quick way to check illumination, age, and phase names in text form. Because it runs cross-platform and works over SSH, it’s popular among terminal enthusiasts and sysadmins who live in the command line. The output can be scripted into cron jobs, motd banners, dashboards, or shared in chat to add a bit of astronomical flair to daily workflows.