Does Earth rise and set when you are on the Moon?
It does not. Earth hangs in one spot and stays there — but it is not perfectly still either. Computed: the exact size of the wobble over one month at Tranquility Base.
Open this exact moment — and move the clock yourself
Live Rendered here and now by the Lunar Aspect engine, not a screenshot. Download free on the App Store
No. Earth hangs in essentially one place and stays there. From Tranquility Base it sits 70.8° above the horizon and it will still be there next week, next month and next year — changing phase the whole time, but never rising and never setting.
Why it is stuck
The Moon turns once on its axis in exactly the time it takes to go once around Earth. That is not a coincidence; tides locked it there over billions of years. The consequence is that one lunar face is permanently turned toward us, and from that face Earth is permanently in the same patch of sky. Where you stand decides where Earth sits, and then it simply stays.
But it does wobble, and you can measure it
The lock is not perfect. The Moon’s orbit is elliptical and its axis is tilted, so it rocks slightly as it goes round — libration. Over one month the engine has Earth drifting 11.9° above the horizon up and down and 34.07° side to side from this site.
That is a real motion, and it is small: Earth itself is 1.89° wide, so the whole month’s wander is a handful of Earth-widths. At this instant the point on the Moon directly beneath Earth — the centre of the wobble — is at 5.00°, 4.87° in lunar coordinates.
Libration is also why we on Earth can see slightly more than half the lunar surface over time: the Moon rocks, and we get a peek round each edge.
How these numbers were produced
Every figure on this page came out of the ephemeris that runs inside Lunar Aspect, computed for Tranquility Base at 2026-10-10 15:30 UTC. Nothing here was typed in by hand: the page is generated, and a number that the engine stops producing breaks the build rather than going quietly stale.
| Value | Produced by |
|---|---|
| 70.8° above the horizon | compute().earth.alt |
| 11.9° above the horizon | earth.alt over 30 days, max − min |
| 34.07° | earth.az over 30 days, max − min |
| 1.89° | compute().earth.angRad × 2 |
| 5.00° | compute().subEarth.lat |
| 4.87° | compute().subEarth.lon |
Engine build 84048b2 2026-09-20 ·
page generated 2026-09-19 ·
positions are apparent, referred to the observing site rather than to the
Moon’s centre.
Move the date yourself
This page is one frozen moment. The engine that computed it runs on a phone, at any date, from anywhere on the Moon — the eclipses, the planets, the comets and Earth’s phase, all of it computed rather than canned.