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 18 August 2016 at 09:27 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 ∠3° of ♒ Aquarius tropical zodiac sector and will enter ♓ Pisces later.
The Full Moon these days is the Sturgeon of August 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 0.3% wider than solar disc. Moon and Sun apparent angular diameters are ∠1901" and ∠1896".
The Moon is 15 days old and navigating through the middle part of the current synodic month. This is lunation 205 of Meeus index or 1158 from Brown series.
The length of this lunation is 29 days, 12 hours and 19 minutes and it is 2 hours and 49 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 25 minutes shorter than the mean synodic month length. It is 5 hours and 44 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 ∠77.9° and at the beginning of the next lunar synodic month the true anomaly is going to be ∠112.8°.
8 days since point of apogee on 10 August 2016 at 00:05 in ♏ Scorpio the lunar orbit is getting narrow while the Moon is moving towards the Earth. It will keep this direction over the next 3 days until the Moon reaches the point of next perigee on 22 August 2016 at 01:20 in ♈ Aries.
The Moon is 376 986 km (234 248 mi) away from Earth and getting closer over the next 3 days until the point perigee when Earth-Moon distance is going to be 367 047 km (228 072 mi).
13 days after ascending node on 5 August 2016 at 07:48 in ♍ Virgo the Moon is positioned north of the ecliptic over the following day until the lunar crosses the ecliptic again from North to South in descending node on 19 August 2016 at 14:14 in ♓ Pisces.
3 days since the last southern standstill on 14 August 2016 at 13:05 in ♐ Sagittarius when the Moon has reached South declination of ∠-18.481° the lunar orbit is extending northward over the next 8 days to face maximum declination of ∠18.455° at the point of next northern standstill on 27 August 2016 at 11:17 in ♋ Cancer.
13 days 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