A good printed lunar atlas is difficult to replace; Lunar Calculator should be used to complement one. The biggest shortcoming of a standard atlas is its inability to show you what the moon looks like tonight, from your observatory. The strength of Lunar Calculator is to simulate this view, as well as those from past observing sessions, and to help you plan for future ones.
Lunar Calculator is designed with the lunar observer in mind. It presents you with an image of the moon as viewed from your location. You can zoom in and out, identify craters and other features, study its rocking motions (libration), and look for future dates that match certain parameters. The view can be flipped or inverted/reversed to match the orientation in any telescope from any place on the planet.
The realistic image is seamlessly stitched together from a series of images generated by NASA from the Clementine mission, with no abrupt changes in brightness and contrast from one "tile" to the next. Its main limitation from an observer's point of view is that the lighting is what we would call "full Moon", when there are few shadows to reveal topographic relief, except at high latitudes.
That's where the USGS shaded relief map comes in - it shows the ridges, rims, peaks and crater depths. Its limitation is that it always shows relief far away from the terminator where in reality the illumination becomes flat.
Lunar Calculator puts the two together in a special "USGS-Clementine" blend to make one of the more visually realistic images around.
Updates will be made from time to time at the LunarCal homepage. (http://www3.telus.net/public/aling/lunarcal/lunarcal.htm)
I've added Rise/Set times directly on the main information column at left, as well as a number of search routines for finding the perfect crescent or full Moon alignment with terrestrial landforms or monuments ("Alt/Az search" under the utility menu). Animation now has an "automatic save during animation" if you want to create a series of images for inserting into a calendar. Some other small improvements include your choice of grid thickness, and how much black space you want to see around the Moon at low power.
The primary addition is a "Schedule of Libration/Colongitude" where you can simply click to create a table for as many days as you want of all the important lunar parameters for observing, and of course you can select the interval between each line. While I was at it, I added the illumination and elongation to the rest of the search routines. There was a minor bug in the future libration table (where the year label stayed the same despite all the other values being correct.
I received some nice feedback and ideas from Lunar Calculator users at the May 2005 General Assembly of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada. Most noticeably, I added a navigation box, a mini-window of the whole Moon which shows a box outlining the current field of view. You can now toggle on/off labels for the major features as well as those in the IKW lunar observing program (see below). For fun, I added a floating "bullseye" scale and a fixed horizontal scale (strictly valid for the center of the Moon). Finally, you can find the distance between any two points on the Moon (right-click to access this function).
If you would like to have a guide to various objects on the Moon, the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada has implemented a lunar observing program that you can follow. The 135 features and 10 libration challenge objects are included in the updated database. Under search, type in IKW and you will see them. To find out more, visit the RASC home page.