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 23 March 2016 at 12:01 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 first ∠3° of ♎ Libra tropical zodiac sector.
The Full Moon these days is the Worm of March 2016.
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 8.1% narrower than solar disc. Moon and Sun apparent angular diameters are ∠1774" and ∠1924".
The Moon is 15 days old and navigating through the middle part of the current synodic month. This is lunation 200 of Meeus index or 1153 from Brown series.
The length of this lunation is 29 days, 9 hours and 29 minutes and it is 1 hour and 23 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 3 hours and 15 minutes shorter than the mean synodic month length. It is 2 hours and 54 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 ∠339.5° and at the beginning of the next lunar synodic month the true anomaly is going to be ∠355.6°.
13 days since point of perigee on 10 March 2016 at 07:02 in ♈ Aries the lunar orbit is getting widen while the Moon is moving away from the Earth. It will keep this direction over the next 2 days until the Moon reaches the point of next apogee on 25 March 2016 at 14:16 in ♎ Libra.
The Moon is 404 032 km (251 054 mi) away from Earth and getting further over the next 2 days until the point apogee when Earth-Moon distance is going to be 406 125 km (252 354 mi).
1 day after ascending node on 22 March 2016 at 12:59 in ♍ Virgo the Moon is positioned north of the ecliptic over the following 13 days until the lunar crosses the ecliptic again from North to South in descending node on 5 April 2016 at 17:27 in ♓ Pisces.
7 days since the last northern standstill on 16 March 2016 at 05:01 in ♋ Cancer when the Moon has reached North declination of ∠18.206° the lunar orbit is extending southward over the next 7 days to face maximum declination of ∠-18.239° at the point of next southern standstill on 30 March 2016 at 22:12 in ♐ Sagittarius.
1 day since the beginning of this draconic month in ♍ Virgo the Moon is navigating from the beginning to the first 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