Waning Gibbous on . The illuminated surface of the moon is 99% 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 ∠11° of ♐ Sagittarius tropical zodiac sector.
Previous main lunar phase is the Full Moon before 1 day on 17 May 2011 at 11:09.
Next Full Moon is the Strawberry Moon of June 2011 after 28 days on 15 June 2011 at 20:13.
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 1% wider than solar disc. Moon and Sun apparent angular diameters are ∠1915" and ∠1897".
The Moon is 16 days old and navigating from the middle to the last part of the current synodic month. This is lunation 140 of Meeus index or 1093 from Brown series.
The length of this lunation is 29 days, 14 hours and 12 minutes and it is 2 hours and 21 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 1 hour and 28 minutes longer than the mean synodic month length. It is 5 hours and 35 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 ∠216.7° and at the beginning of the next lunar synodic month the true anomaly is going to be ∠248.4°.
3 days since point of perigee on 15 May 2011 at 11:18 in ♎ Libra 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 27 May 2011 at 09:58 in ♈ Aries.
The Moon is 374 275 km (232 564 mi) away from Earth and getting further over the next 8 days until the point apogee when Earth-Moon distance is going to be 405 006 km (251 659 mi).
11 days after descending node on 6 May 2011 at 14:54 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 19 May 2011 at 09:03 in ♐ Sagittarius.
At 23:26 the Moon is meeting its standstill point to reach South declination of ∠-23.403°. Over the upcoming 14 days the lunar orbit is going to tilt northward to face maximum declination of ∠23.393° at the point of next northern standstill in ♊ Gemini on 2 June 2011 at 09:54.
26 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 14 days on 1 June 2011 at 21:03 in ♊ Gemini 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
