Where is Tycho on the Moon?
Tycho sits at 43.30° south, 11.22° west, in the rugged southern highlands of the nearside — the half of the Moon that always faces Earth. It is the bright spot near the bottom of the Moon when you look up at a full Moon with the naked eye, with pale streaks running outward from it across the whole disc.
How big and how deep is Tycho?
Tycho is 85 kilometers across and about 4.7 kilometers deep from its rim down to its floor. For scale, if you stood on the crater floor the rim would rise higher above you than any mountain in the Alps, and the far wall would be beyond the horizon.
Why does Tycho have bright rays?
The rays are material thrown out by the impact, spread across the surface in long streaks. They are bright because they are fresh: at roughly 108 million years old, Tycho has not yet been darkened by the slow weathering that dulls older terrain. That age comes from radiometric dating of impact melt glass thought to originate from the event.
What does Tycho look like as a 3D print?
It prints unusually well, and the reason is the depth. Many lunar regions are subtle enough that you need terrain exaggeration to see anything at all; Tycho's rim, terraced walls and central peak are dramatic at true scale. The result reads as a crater from across the room, which is not true of every destination.
The rays themselves are a difference in brightness, not in height, so they do not appear as relief in a print. What you get is the bowl, the terraces and the peak.
What is OrbitStudio?
OrbitStudio turns real NASA lunar elevation data into 3D-printable models. You pick a region of the Moon on a globe or a flat map, choose a jigsaw puzzle or a solid ornament, and get one ready-to-print file with terrain and borders already separated and colored. No CAD, no mesh repair. The heights come from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, which has been measuring the Moon's surface since 2009.
Trying it is free and needs no account: pick a region, generate it and turn it around in 3D. Downloading the model — STL files and pre-colored 3MF files for Bambu Studio or OrcaSlicer — uses one credit from a pass. The generator covers Mars too.
Other landmarks
The night sky, too
OrbitStudio Sky, the night-sky tool, turns the sky over any place, on any date from 1900 to 2100, into a 3D-printable star map. Its STL is free.