Archival imagery is streamed rather than preloaded. A global base texture carries the whole sphere; as the view descends, LROC WAC map tiles for the region in view are fetched from NASA Moon Trek. The source mosaic is sampled at 303 pixels per degree (≈100 m/px); this viewer is capped at tile level 7, ≈167 m/px. No live camera feed is involved. Scientific layers, nomenclature, and the permanent lunar-event record reside on the data globe.
Loading the append-only Moon Worlds event record…
The LROC WAC mosaic is 109,165 pixels wide at full sampling, beyond the single-texture limit of current hardware (commonly 16,384 px). The surface is therefore covered by a quadtree of tiles. An 8k texture covers the whole sphere as a seamless base; above it the renderer resolves the patch under the camera and the camera distance, selects the matching tile level, and drapes only those tiles, refining on approach and releasing them on retreat. The scheme is that of Google Maps, Cesium, and NASA Moon Trek.
Tiles are drawn from NASA Moon Trek's geographic (equirectangular) WMTS endpoint for the LROC WAC mosaic; at level z the grid is 2z+1 columns by 2z rows of 256 px. Source, projection, and maximum level are declared in a single TILES block at the head of the script, so the same engine can address Diviner, LOLA shaded relief, or any other Moon Trek layer, or Mars and Mercury Trek for other bodies. Where the tile host refuses cross-origin requests, the base globe is retained and a notice is displayed.
Coordinates follow the east-positive selenographic (Mean-Earth) convention, matching the data globe. Landing sites are read from features.json; recorded-change markers are read from the append-only events.json. Those markers locate evidence and do not imply that the underlying WAC mosaic resolves the feature.