Last Quarter on . The illuminated surface of the moon is 43% and getting smaller. The lunar cycle is 22 days old.
* The exact date and time of this Last Quarter phase is on 4 March 2013 at 21:53 UTC.
The moon rises at midnight and sets at noon. It is visible to the south in the morning.
Slide horizontally to discover the moon phase on nearby dates.
Main moon phases of the following lunar cycle.
Moon is passing about ∠23° of ♐ Sagittarius tropical zodiac sector.
Next Full Moon is the Worm Moon of March 2013 after 21 days on 27 March 2013 at 09:27.
There is low ocean tide on this date. Sun and Moon gravitational forces are not aligned, but meet at big angle, so their combined tidal force is weak.
Lunar disc appears visually 2% wider than solar disc. Moon and Sun apparent angular diameters are ∠1973" and ∠1934".
The Moon is 22 days old and navigating through the last part of the current synodic month. This is lunation 162 of Meeus index or 1115 from Brown series.
The length of this lunation is 29 days, 12 hours and 31 minutes and it is 1 hour and 13 minutes shorter than the upcoming lunation's length. 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 13 minutes shorter than the mean synodic month length. It is 5 hours and 56 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 ∠44.2° and at the beginning of the next lunar synodic month the true anomaly is going to be ∠73.6°.
Moon is at perigee at 23:20 about 14 days since last apogee on 19 February 2013 at 06:30 in ♊ Gemini the lunar orbit is going to widen while the Moon is moving away from the Earth over the upcoming 13 days until point of next apogee on 19 March 2013 at 03:13 in ♊ Gemini.
This perigee Moon is 369 954 km (229 879 mi) away from Earth. This is the year's farthest perigee of 2013. It is 7 446 km closer than the mean perigee distance, but it is still 402 km further than the closest perigee of 21st century.
2 days after ascending node on 3 March 2013 at 02:30 in ♏ Scorpio the Moon is positioned north of the ecliptic over the following 10 days until the lunar crosses the ecliptic again from North to South in descending node on 16 March 2013 at 06:15 in ♉ Taurus.
At 06:41 the Moon is meeting its standstill point to reach South declination of ∠-20.453°. Over the upcoming 13 days the lunar orbit is going to tilt northward to face maximum declination of ∠20.335° at the point of next northern standstill in ♊ Gemini on 18 March 2013 at 21:50.
2 days since the beginning of this draconic month in ♏ Scorpio the Moon is navigating from the beginning to the first part of the lunar cycle.
In 6 days on 11 March 2013 at 19:51 in ♓ Pisces 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