Full Moon on . The illuminated surface of the moon is 99%. The lunar cycle is 15 days old.
* The exact date and time of this Full Moon phase is on 22 December 2018 at 17:49 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 about ∠12° of ♋ Cancer tropical zodiac sector.
The Full Moon these days is the Cold of December 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 0.3% wider than solar disc. Moon and Sun apparent angular diameters are ∠1956" and ∠1951".
The Moon is 15 days old and navigating through the middle part of the current synodic month. This is lunation 234 of Meeus index or 1187 from Brown series.
The length of this lunation is 29 days, 18 hours and 8 minutes and it is 1 hour and 27 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 5 hours and 24 minutes longer than the mean synodic month length. It is 1 hour and 39 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 ∠116.6° and at the beginning of the next lunar synodic month the true anomaly is going to be ∠149.4°.
10 days since point of apogee on 12 December 2018 at 12:25 in ♒ Aquarius the lunar orbit is getting narrow while the Moon is moving towards the Earth. It will keep this direction over the next day until the Moon reaches the point of next perigee on 24 December 2018 at 09:52 in ♋ Cancer.
The Moon is 366 484 km (227 723 mi) away from Earth and getting closer over the next day until the point perigee when Earth-Moon distance is going to be 361 060 km (224 352 mi).
12 days after descending node on 10 December 2018 at 17:57 in ♑ Capricorn the Moon is positioned south of the ecliptic over the following day until the lunar crosses the ecliptic again from South to North in ascending node on 24 December 2018 at 11:54 in ♋ Cancer.
At 11:48 the Moon is meeting its standstill point to reach North declination of ∠21.550°. This is the year's northernmost lunar standstill of 2018. Over the upcoming 13 days the lunar orbit is going to tilt southward to face maximum declination of ∠-21.553° at the point of next southern standstill in ♑ Capricorn on 5 January 2019 at 18:45.
26 days since the beginning of this draconic month in ♋ Cancer 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