The Orb ProjectThe sun and moon, as light and sound |
Time | --:-- | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Loc. | Locating… | ||
| Artist | LUKEABC | Created | February 2026 |
As long as I can remember I have been fascinated by the sky, planets and space. When I was 15 my dad took me to see Olafur Eliasson's The Weather Project (2003), a vast artificial sun suspended in the Tate Modern's Turbine Hall. The Orb Project owes its visual language to Eliasson, but explores what that warmth means when it isn't constant. The sun and moon are entirely separate bodies — different physics, different origins, no real connection, except that moonlight is sunlight, reflected. From where we stand, they feel like two halves of one whole. This piece presents them as one — a single orb of light and sound — while keeping them, underneath, entirely apart.
The Orb Project presents the sun and the moon as a single glowing orb in a dark void. Its colour and intensity are determined by the real sky above you, right now. The sound is the sun and moon themselves — their oscillations and resonances, translated into audible frequencies.
The piece uses your coordinates and your device's clock to calculate the exact positions of the sun and moon in your sky using Jean Meeus's astronomical algorithms. Nothing is fetched from the internet. Everything is computed from first principles, here, in your browser.
Every viewer sees and hears something different, because every viewer is under a different sky.
The orb's colour, size, and presence are determined by the real positions of the sun and moon above the viewer, calculated in real time from first principles.
Solar and lunar coordinates are computed client-side using Jean Meeus's positional astronomy algorithms (Astronomical Algorithms, 2nd ed., Willmann-Bell, 1998). The sun's position follows Meeus Chapter 25, deriving apparent right ascension and declination from the Earth's orbital elements via solar longitude, obliquity of the ecliptic, and nutation corrections — accurate to within 0.01°. The moon's position follows Chapter 47, evaluating over a hundred periodic terms across lunar longitude, latitude, and distance, derived from the fundamental arguments of lunar theory. Atmospheric refraction is applied using Meeus's formula (§16.4), correcting for the bending of light near the horizon — the same effect that makes the real sun appear to linger at sunset.
The orb's visual character shifts with the body's elevation angle:
Near the horizon (0°–10°), the orb swells and deepens — its apparent radius increases and its palette shifts toward longer wavelengths, mimicking the reddening of light that passes through a greater depth of atmosphere at low angles (Rayleigh scattering). High in the sky (40°+), the orb contracts and intensifies, its core brightening and its glow tightening. Below the horizon, the body contributes nothing — it is genuinely absent.
The sun's palette moves from deep red-pink at the core through orange and amber to a gold rim. The moon's palette moves from pale blue-white through silver to an icy rim, its brightness modulated by the real lunar illumination fraction — itself derived from the sun–Earth–moon elongation angle (Meeus Chapter 48).
When both bodies are above the horizon simultaneously — a common occurrence — their contributions are summed additively. Neither diminishes the other.
The orb is rendered as a WebGL fragment shader: a radial distance field with layered colour stops and an exponential glow falloff, computed per-pixel at display resolution. There are no textures, no images, no pre-rendered assets. The light is computed from mathematics alone.
The sound comes from a stranger place.
The sun has been vibrating since it formed. Pressure waves travel through its interior, making the whole thing ring at frequencies far too low to hear — one oscillation roughly every five minutes. Scientists discovered this in the 1960s by watching the solar surface pulse in and out. A researcher named Alexander Kosovichev sped these oscillations up 42,000 times to make them audible. The sun voice here does the same thing: ten oscillators tuned to the actual solar frequency spectrum, shifted into human hearing range, spaced at the real intervals between modes.
The moon voice comes from Apollo. When the astronauts left seismometers on the lunar surface, they found that impacts made the moon reverberate for over an hour. No atmosphere, no water — nothing to absorb the energy. It just rang. The moon sound here is built from that: inharmonic partials based on how a rigid sphere vibrates, wrapped in a long synthetic reverb to approximate that extraordinary, airless decay.
The sun's acoustic oscillations — pressure waves (p-modes) — resonate through the solar interior, first observed by Leighton, Noyes and Simon in 1962. These oscillations peak at 3.3 millihertz. Following the method established by Alexander Kosovichev at Stanford University using data from the SOHO spacecraft's Michelson Doppler Imager, the frequencies are transposed upward by a factor of 42,000, preserving the harmonic relationships between modes.
| Parameter | Value |
|---|---|
| Peak frequency | 3.3 mHz |
| Speed-up factor | 42,000× |
| Audible base | 138.6 Hz |
| Mode spacing (Δν) | 135 μHz → 5.67 Hz |
| Mode count | 10 oscillators |
| Waveform | Sine (pressure oscillation) |
The characteristic beating you hear is real: it is the interference pattern of adjacent acoustic modes.
When the Apollo 12 crew deliberately crashed their Lunar Module ascent stage into the surface, seismometers recorded the Moon vibrating for over 55 minutes — its dry, rigid interior sustaining reverberations that on Earth would last seconds. Scientists described the Moon as ringing like a gong.
The dominant moonquake frequency of approximately 1 Hz, identified in Yosio Nakamura's definitive analysis of the Apollo seismic dataset, is transposed upward by a factor of 250 and rendered through inharmonic partials derived from circular membrane vibration modes (Bessel function zeros).
| Parameter | Value |
|---|---|
| Base frequency | 1 Hz |
| Speed-up factor | 250× |
| Audible base | 250 Hz |
| Partial ratios | 1.0, 1.593, 2.136, 2.296, 2.653, 3.156, 3.501 |
| Reverb decay | 6 s (compressed from 55+ min) |
A long synthetic impulse response approximates the Moon's extraordinary seismic decay.
As the sun or moon climbs higher in your sky, its voice rises in pitch and grows louder. As it moves from east to west, the sound drifts across your left and right speakers. When it drops below the horizon, the voice doesn't stop — it goes quiet and muffled, like hearing something from very far away. Because the sun and moon are always there. They don't disappear. They just pass beneath you.
| Meeus | Meeus, J. (1998). Astronomical Algorithms, 2nd ed. Willmann-Bell. Chapters 25, 47, 48, §16.4. |
| Leighton | Leighton, R. B., Noyes, R. W., & Simon, G. W. (1962). Velocity Fields in the Solar Atmosphere. I. Preliminary Report. Astrophysical Journal, 135, 474. |
| Kosovichev | Kosovichev, A. G. Solar Oscillation Sound Files. Stanford Solar Oscillations Investigation. |
| Nakamura | Nakamura, Y. (1982). Apollo Lunar Seismic Experiment — Final Summary. Journal of Geophysical Research, 87(S01), A117. |
| Christensen-Dalsgaard | Christensen-Dalsgaard, J. (2002). Helioseismology. Reviews of Modern Physics, 74(4), 1073–1129. |
| USNO | U.S. Naval Observatory. Astronomical Almanac. U.S. Government Printing Office. |
No dependencies, no external data. Meeus algorithms in JavaScript, visuals in WebGL, sound from the Web Audio API. Two inputs: where you are, what time it is.