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 30 December 2020 at 03:28 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 ∠13° of ♋ Cancer tropical zodiac sector.
The Full Moon these days is the Cold of December 2020.
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 6.5% narrower than solar disc. Moon and Sun apparent angular diameters are ∠1828" and ∠1951".
The Moon is 15 days old and navigating through the middle part of the current synodic month. This is lunation 259 of Meeus index or 1212 from Brown series.
The length of this lunation is 29 days, 12 hours and 44 minutes and it is 1 hour and 21 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 equal to the mean synodic month length. It is %hours_to_shortest% and %minutes_to_shortest% longer than the 21st century's shortest and %hours_to_longest% and %minutes_to_longest% shorter than the 21st century's longest synodic months.
The true anomaly of the Moon orbit at the beginning of this lunation cycle is ∠30.1° and at the beginning of the next lunar synodic month the true anomaly is going to be ∠53.8°.
5 days since point of apogee on 24 December 2020 at 16:32 in ♈ Aries the lunar orbit is getting narrow while the Moon is moving towards the Earth. It will keep this direction over the next 10 days until the Moon reaches the point of next perigee on 9 January 2021 at 15:39 in ♏ Scorpio.
The Moon is 392 181 km (243 690 mi) away from Earth and getting closer over the next 10 days until the point perigee when Earth-Moon distance is going to be 367 390 km (228 286 mi).
1 day after ascending node on 28 December 2020 at 15:03 in ♊ Gemini the Moon is positioned north of the ecliptic over the following 11 days until the lunar crosses the ecliptic again from North to South in descending node on 10 January 2021 at 20:15 in ♐ Sagittarius.
At 07:53 the Moon is meeting its standstill point to reach North declination of ∠24.868°. Over the upcoming 12 days the lunar orbit is going to tilt southward to face maximum declination of ∠-24.870° at the point of next southern standstill in ♑ Capricorn on 12 January 2021 at 08:18.
1 day since the beginning of this draconic month in ♊ Gemini 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