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 6 April 2012 at 19:19 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 ∠13° of ♎ Libra tropical zodiac sector.
The Full Moon these days is the Pink of April 2012.
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 2.2% wider than solar disc. Moon and Sun apparent angular diameters are ∠1959" and ∠1917".
The Moon is 14 days old and navigating through the middle part of the current synodic month. This is lunation 151 of Meeus index or 1104 from Brown series.
The length of this lunation is 29 days, 16 hours and 41 minutes and it is 12 minutes longer than the upcoming lunation's length. This is the year's longest synodic month of 2012. 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 3 hours and 57 minutes longer than the mean synodic month length. It is 3 hours and 6 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 ∠142.2° and at the beginning of the next lunar synodic month the true anomaly is going to be ∠168.7°.
11 days since point of apogee on 26 March 2012 at 06:04 in ♉ Taurus the lunar orbit is getting narrow while the Moon is moving towards the Earth. It will keep this direction over the next day until the Moon reaches the point of next perigee on 7 April 2012 at 16:59 in ♎ Libra.
The Moon is 365 821 km (227 311 mi) away from Earth and getting closer over the next day until the point perigee when Earth-Moon distance is going to be 358 314 km (222 646 mi).
9 days after descending node on 28 March 2012 at 00:19 in ♊ Gemini the Moon is positioned south of the ecliptic over the following 3 days until the lunar crosses the ecliptic again from South to North in ascending node on 10 April 2012 at 00:47 in ♐ Sagittarius.
8 days since the last northern standstill on 28 March 2012 at 23:40 in ♊ Gemini when the Moon has reached North declination of ∠21.890° the lunar orbit is extending southward over the next 4 days to face maximum declination of ∠-21.814° at the point of next southern standstill on 10 April 2012 at 21:03 in ♐ Sagittarius.
23 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.
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