Waning Gibbous on . The illuminated surface of the moon is 71% and getting smaller. The lunar cycle is 20 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 ∠9° of ♐ Sagittarius tropical zodiac sector.
Previous main lunar phase is the Full Moon before 4 days on 19 March 2011 at 18:10.
Next Full Moon is the Pink Moon of April 2011 after 24 days on 18 April 2011 at 02:44.
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 0.8% narrower than solar disc. Moon and Sun apparent angular diameters are ∠1910" and ∠1924".
The Moon is 20 days old and navigating from the middle to the last part of the current synodic month. This is lunation 138 of Meeus index or 1091 from Brown series.
The length of this lunation is 29 days, 17 hours and 46 minutes and it is 1 hour and 28 minutes longer 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 5 hours and 2 minutes longer than the mean synodic month length. It is 2 hours and 1 minute 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 ∠167° and at the beginning of the next lunar synodic month the true anomaly is going to be ∠190.9°.
4 days since point of perigee on 19 March 2011 at 19:09 in ♍ Virgo the lunar orbit is getting widen while the Moon is moving away from the Earth. It will keep this direction over the next 8 days until the Moon reaches the point of next apogee on 2 April 2011 at 09:00 in ♓ Pisces.
The Moon is 375 347 km (233 230 mi) away from Earth and getting further over the next 8 days until the point apogee when Earth-Moon distance is going to be 406 656 km (252 684 mi).
11 days after descending node on 13 March 2011 at 11:55 in ♊ Gemini the Moon is positioned south of the ecliptic over the following day until the lunar crosses the ecliptic again from South to North in ascending node on 25 March 2011 at 21:09 in ♐ Sagittarius.
11 days since the last northern standstill on 12 March 2011 at 17:06 in ♊ Gemini when the Moon has reached North declination of ∠23.825° the lunar orbit is extending southward over the next day to face maximum declination of ∠-23.716° at the point of next southern standstill on 25 March 2011 at 05:02 in ♐ Sagittarius.
25 days since the beginning of this draconic month in ♐ Sagittarius the Moon is navigating from the second to the final part of the lunar cycle.
In 10 days on 3 April 2011 at 14:32 in ♈ Aries 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