Waning Gibbous on . The illuminated surface of the moon is 98% and getting smaller. The lunar cycle is 16 days old.
The moon rises in the evening and sets in the morning. It is visible to the southwest and it is high in the sky after midnight.
Slide horizontally to discover the moon phase on nearby dates.
Main moon phases of the following lunar cycle.
Moon is passing about ∠6° of ♋ Cancer tropical zodiac sector.
Previous main lunar phase is the Full Moon before 1 day on 8 December 2003 at 20:37.
Next Full Moon is the Wolf Moon of January 2004 after 28 days on 7 January 2004 at 15:40.
There is medium ocean tide on this date. Sun and Moon gravitational forces are not aligned, but meet at very acute angle, so their combined tidal force is moderate.
Lunar disc appears visually 8.9% narrower than solar disc. Moon and Sun apparent angular diameters are ∠1783" and ∠1949".
The Moon is 16 days old and navigating from the middle to the last part of the current synodic month. This is lunation 48 of Meeus index or 1001 from Brown series.
The length of this lunation is 29 days, 10 hours and 44 minutes and it is 38 minutes shorter than the upcoming lunation's length. The lengths of the following synodic months are going to increase with the lunar orbit true anomaly getting closer to the value it has at the point of New Moon at apogee (∠180°).
The length of the current synodic month is 2 hours shorter than the mean synodic month length. It is 4 hours and 9 minutes longer compared to 21st century's shortest synodic month length.
The true anomaly of the Moon orbit at the beginning of this lunation cycle is ∠359.8° and at the beginning of the next lunar synodic month the true anomaly is going to be ∠15.5°.
2 days since point of apogee on 7 December 2003 at 12:05 in ♊ Gemini the lunar orbit is getting narrow while the Moon is moving towards the Earth. It will keep this direction over the next 11 days until the Moon reaches the point of next perigee on 22 December 2003 at 11:53 in ♐ Sagittarius.
The Moon is 401 978 km (249 778 mi) away from Earth and getting closer over the next 11 days until the point perigee when Earth-Moon distance is going to be 358 342 km (222 663 mi).
3 days after ascending node on 6 December 2003 at 16:00 in ♉ Taurus the Moon is positioned north of the ecliptic over the following 10 days until the lunar crosses the ecliptic again from North to South in descending node on 20 December 2003 at 16:07 in ♏ Scorpio.
At 15:56 the Moon is meeting its standstill point to reach North declination of ∠27.057°. Over the upcoming 13 days the lunar orbit is going to tilt southward to face maximum declination of ∠-27.044° at the point of next southern standstill in ♑ Capricorn on 23 December 2003 at 20:12.
3 days since the beginning of this draconic month in ♉ Taurus the Moon is navigating from the beginning to the first part of the lunar cycle.
In 12 days on 23 December 2003 at 09:43 in ♑ Capricorn the Moon is going to be in a New Moon geocentric conjunction with the Sun and thus forming the next Sun-Moon-Earth syzygy alignment.
Parts of this Lunar Calendar are based on Planetary Ephemeris Data Courtesy of Fred Espenak, www.Astropixels.com
Moon phase image credit to NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio, svs.gsfc.nasa.gov