Full Moon on . The illuminated surface of the moon is 100%. The lunar cycle is 14 days old.
* The exact date and time of this Full Moon phase is on 27 December 2023 at 00:33 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 ∠2° of ♊ Gemini tropical zodiac sector and will enter ♋ Cancer later.
The Full Moon these days is the Cold of December 2023.
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 6.1% narrower than solar disc. Moon and Sun apparent angular diameters are ∠1836" and ∠1951".
The Moon is 14 days old and navigating through the middle part of the current synodic month. This is lunation 296 of Meeus index or 1249 from Brown series.
The length of this lunation is 29 days, 12 hours and 25 minutes and it is 1 hour and 23 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 19 minutes shorter than the mean synodic month length. It is 5 hours and 50 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 ∠303.6° and at the beginning of the next lunar synodic month the true anomaly is going to be ∠328°.
9 days since point of perigee on 16 December 2023 at 18:53 in ♒ Aquarius the lunar orbit is getting widen while the Moon is moving away from the Earth. It will keep this direction over the next 6 days until the Moon reaches the point of next apogee on 1 January 2024 at 15:28 in ♍ Virgo.
The Moon is 390 383 km (242 573 mi) away from Earth and getting further over the next 6 days until the point apogee when Earth-Moon distance is going to be 404 911 km (251 600 mi).
4 days after ascending node on 21 December 2023 at 13:54 in ♈ Aries the Moon is positioned north of the ecliptic over the following 9 days until the lunar crosses the ecliptic again from North to South in descending node on 4 January 2024 at 18:52 in ♎ Libra.
At 21:50 the Moon is meeting its standstill point to reach North declination of ∠28.131°. Over the upcoming 14 days the lunar orbit is going to tilt southward to face maximum declination of ∠-28.164° at the point of next southern standstill in ♑ Capricorn on 10 January 2024 at 07:04.
4 days since the beginning of this draconic month in ♈ Aries 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