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Q&A

How can a moon have an ever-changing face?

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Imagine an inhabitated planet like ours with a moon of the same projected size in the sky. The moon has visible structures of colors or darker and lighter areas.

Every evening when the moon gets visible in the sky, it's surface changed in at least 1/4 of the visible area. It didn't just rotate, no-one on this planet has ever seen the same image of the moon twice in their life.

How is it possible that the structure or pattern on the surface of a moon changes constantly while the planet is stable enough to support intelligent life?

Edit due to so many answers requiring an atmosphere to work: The moon can have an atmosphere, but the changing patterns must be on a planetary (or moony?) scale and look otherworldly. Simple clouds floating around are too similar to what the natives see every day on their home planet. Giant stoms like on Jupiter are ok, but they have the tendency to repeat their patterns.

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This post was sourced from https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/136881. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.

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The surface of the moon is covered in an exotic lifeform with an exceedingly rapid lifecycle. Colonies of this lifeform grow to cover large portions of the lunar surface in as little as 12 hours, competing for space with surrounding colonies, before rapidly crashing as soil fertility is depleted. No sooner has one colony collapsed, than another has begun its growth on another part of the moon's surface.

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