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 14 December 2016 at 00:06 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 ∠0° of ♊ Gemini tropical zodiac sector.
The Full Moon these days is the Cold of December 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 0.2% wider than solar disc. Moon and Sun apparent angular diameters are ∠1953" and ∠1950".
The Moon is 15 days old and navigating through the middle part of the current synodic month. This is lunation 209 of Meeus index or 1162 from Brown series.
The length of this lunation is 29 days, 18 hours and 35 minutes and it is 1 hour and 21 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 5 hours and 51 minutes longer than the mean synodic month length. It is 1 hour and 12 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 ∠194.9° and at the beginning of the next lunar synodic month the true anomaly is going to be ∠223.4°.
1 day since point of perigee on 12 December 2016 at 23:27 in ♉ Taurus the lunar orbit is getting widen while the Moon is moving away from the Earth. It will keep this direction over the next 10 days until the Moon reaches the point of next apogee on 25 December 2016 at 05:55 in ♏ Scorpio.
The Moon is 367 032 km (228 063 mi) away from Earth and getting further over the next 10 days until the point apogee when Earth-Moon distance is going to be 405 870 km (252 196 mi).
7 days after descending node on 6 December 2016 at 17:35 in ♓ Pisces the Moon is positioned south of the ecliptic over the following 4 days until the lunar crosses the ecliptic again from South to North in ascending node on 19 December 2016 at 04:46 in ♍ Virgo.
At 21:43 the Moon is meeting its standstill point to reach North declination of ∠18.937°. This is the year's northernmost lunar standstill of 2016. Over the upcoming 14 days the lunar orbit is going to tilt southward to face maximum declination of ∠-18.958° at the point of next southern standstill in ♑ Capricorn on 29 December 2016 at 03:30.
22 days since the beginning of this draconic month in ♍ Virgo 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