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 12 December 2008 at 16:37 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 about ∠18° of ♊ Gemini tropical zodiac sector.
The Full Moon these days is the Cold of December 2008.
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 1.1% wider than solar disc. Moon and Sun apparent angular diameters are ∠1972" and ∠1949".
The Moon is 14 days old and navigating through the middle part of the current synodic month. This is lunation 110 of Meeus index or 1063 from Brown series.
The length of this lunation is 29 days, 19 hours and 28 minutes and it is 5 minutes shorter than the upcoming lunation's length. The lengths of the following synodic months are going to decrease with the lunar orbit true anomaly getting closer to the value it has at the point of New Moon at perigee (∠0° or ∠360°).
The length of the current synodic month is 6 hours and 44 minutes longer than the mean synodic month length. It is 19 minutes shorter compared to 21st century's longest synodic month length.
The true anomaly of the Moon orbit at the beginning of this lunation cycle is ∠161.9° and at the beginning of the next lunar synodic month the true anomaly is going to be ∠186.6°.
Moon is at perigee at 21:37 about 13 days since last apogee on 29 November 2008 at 16:55 in ♐ Sagittarius the lunar orbit is going to widen while the Moon is moving away from the Earth over the upcoming 14 days until point of next apogee on 26 December 2008 at 17:50 in ♐ Sagittarius.
This perigee Moon is 356 568 km (221 561 mi) away from Earth. This is the year's closest perigee of 2008. It is 5 940 km closer than the mean perigee distance, but it is still 143 km further than the closest perigee of 21st century.
9 days after ascending node on 3 December 2008 at 04:47 in ♒ Aquarius the Moon is positioned north of the ecliptic over the following 3 days until the lunar crosses the ecliptic again from North to South in descending node on 15 December 2008 at 23:02 in ♌ Leo.
At 18:39 the Moon is meeting its standstill point to reach North declination of ∠27.024°. This is the year's northernmost lunar standstill of 2008. Over the upcoming 13 days the lunar orbit is going to tilt southward to face maximum declination of ∠-27.026° at the point of next southern standstill in ♐ Sagittarius on 26 December 2008 at 08:03.
9 days since the beginning of this draconic month in ♒ Aquarius 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