Full Moon on . The illuminated surface of the moon is 99%. The lunar cycle is 14 days old.
* The exact date and time of this Full Moon phase is on 2 January 2018 at 02:24 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 ∠2° of ♋ Cancer tropical zodiac sector.
The Full Moon these days is the Wolf of January 2018.
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 1.1% wider than solar disc. Moon and Sun apparent angular diameters are ∠1973" and ∠1951".
The Moon is 14 days old and navigating through the middle part of the current synodic month. This is lunation 222 of Meeus index or 1175 from Brown series.
The length of this lunation is 29 days, 19 hours and 47 minutes and it is 59 minutes longer than the upcoming lunation's length. This is the year's longest synodic month of 2018. 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 7 hours and 3 minutes longer than the mean synodic month length and it is the longest synodic month length of 21st century.
The true anomaly of the Moon orbit at the beginning of this lunation cycle is ∠173.3° and at the beginning of the next lunar synodic month the true anomaly is going to be ∠198.1°.
Moon is at perigee at 21:54 about 13 days since last apogee on 19 December 2017 at 01:27 in ♑ Capricorn 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 15 January 2018 at 02:10 in ♑ Capricorn.
This perigee Moon is 356 566 km (221 560 mi) away from Earth. This is the year's closest perigee of 2018. It is 5 942 km closer than the mean perigee distance, but it is still 141 km further than the closest perigee of 21st century.
10 days after descending node on 22 December 2017 at 10:04 in ♒ Aquarius the Moon is positioned south of the ecliptic over the following 2 days until the lunar crosses the ecliptic again from South to North in ascending node on 4 January 2018 at 07:48 in ♌ Leo.
13 days since the last southern standstill on 19 December 2017 at 09:31 in ♑ Capricorn when the Moon has reached South declination of ∠-20.062° the lunar orbit is extending northward over the next day to face maximum declination of ∠20.055° at the point of next northern standstill on 2 January 2018 at 00:01 in ♋ Cancer.
24 days since the beginning of this draconic month in ♌ Leo 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