Full Moon on . The illuminated surface of the moon is 100%. The lunar cycle is 14 days old.
* The exact date and time of this Full Moon phase is on 26 December 2004 at 15:06 UTC.
The moon rises at sunset and sets at sunrise. It is visible all night and it is high in the sky around midnight.
Slide horizontally to discover the moon phase on nearby dates.
Main moon phases of the following lunar cycle.
Moon is passing first ∠4° of ♋ Cancer tropical zodiac sector.
The Full Moon these days is the Cold of December 2004.
There is high Full Moon ocean tide on this date. Combined Sun and Moon gravitational tidal force working on Earth is strong, because of the Sun-Earth-Moon syzygy alignment.
Lunar disc appears visually 9.7% narrower than solar disc. Moon and Sun apparent angular diameters are ∠1770" and ∠1951".
The Moon is 14 days old and navigating through the middle part of the current synodic month. This is lunation 61 of Meeus index or 1014 from Brown series.
The length of this lunation is 29 days, 10 hours and 34 minutes and it is 9 minutes longer than the upcoming lunation's length. This is the year's shortest synodic month of 2004. 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 and 10 minutes shorter than the mean synodic month length. It is 3 hours and 59 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 ∠345.8° and at the beginning of the next lunar synodic month the true anomaly is going to be ∠1.4°.
13 days since point of perigee on 12 December 2004 at 21:30 in ♐ Sagittarius the lunar orbit is getting widen while the Moon is moving away from the Earth. It will keep this direction over the next day until the Moon reaches the point of next apogee on 27 December 2004 at 19:15 in ♋ Cancer.
The Moon is 404 964 km (251 633 mi) away from Earth and getting further over the next day until the point apogee when Earth-Moon distance is going to be 406 488 km (252 580 mi).
5 days after ascending node on 21 December 2004 at 06:51 in ♉ Taurus the Moon is positioned north of the ecliptic over the following 9 days until the lunar crosses the ecliptic again from North to South in descending node on 4 January 2005 at 21:52 in ♎ Libra.
At 14:10 the Moon is meeting its standstill point to reach North declination of ∠27.905°. Over the upcoming 13 days the lunar orbit is going to tilt southward to face maximum declination of ∠-27.938° at the point of next southern standstill in ♑ Capricorn on 9 January 2005 at 11:17.
5 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.
The Moon is in a Full Moon geocentric opposition with the Sun and thus forming Sun-Earth-Moon 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