Full Moon on . The illuminated surface of the moon is 100%. The lunar cycle is 15 days old.
* The exact date and time of this Full Moon phase is on 16 January 2014 at 04:52 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 leaving the last ∠1° of ♋ Cancer tropical zodiac sector and will enter ♌ Leo later.
The Full Moon these days is the Wolf of January 2014.
There is extremely high Full Moon ocean tide on this date. Combined Sun and Moon gravitational tidal force working on Earth is heavy, because of the Sun-Earth-Moon syzygy alignment and the near perigee.
Lunar disc appears visually 9.8% narrower than solar disc. Moon and Sun apparent angular diameters are ∠1768" and ∠1950".
The Moon is 15 days old and navigating through the middle part of the current synodic month. This is lunation 173 of Meeus index or 1126 from Brown series.
The length of this lunation is 29 days, 10 hours and 24 minutes and it is 3 minutes longer 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 2 hours and 20 minutes shorter than the mean synodic month length. It is 3 hours and 49 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 ∠353° and at the beginning of the next lunar synodic month the true anomaly is going to be ∠8.3°.
Moon is at apogee at 01:53 about 14 days since last perigee on 1 January 2014 at 21:00 in ♑ Capricorn the lunar orbit is going to narrow while the Moon is moving towards the Earth over the upcoming 13 days until point of next perigee on 30 January 2014 at 09:58 in ♒ Aquarius.
This apogee Moon is 406 537 km (252 610 mi) away from Earth. It is 1 129 km further than the mean apogee distance, but it is still 172 km closer than the farthest apogee of 21st century.
7 days after descending node on 9 January 2014 at 11:26 in ♉ Taurus the Moon is positioned south of the ecliptic over the following 7 days until the lunar crosses the ecliptic again from South to North in ascending node on 24 January 2014 at 02:55 in ♏ Scorpio.
3 days since the last northern standstill on 13 January 2014 at 08:14 in ♊ Gemini when the Moon has reached North declination of ∠19.501° the lunar orbit is extending southward over the next 11 days to face maximum declination of ∠-19.396° at the point of next southern standstill on 27 January 2014 at 16:31 in ♐ Sagittarius.
19 days since the beginning of this draconic month in ♏ Scorpio 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