Waning Gibbous on . The illuminated surface of the moon is 96% and getting smaller. The lunar cycle is 16 days old.
The moon rises in the evening and sets in the morning. It is visible to the southwest and it is high in the sky after 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 ♐ Sagittarius tropical zodiac sector and will enter ♑ Capricorn later.
Previous main lunar phase is the Full Moon before 1 day on 23 May 2024 at 13:53.
Next Full Moon is the Strawberry Moon of June 2024 after 27 days on 22 June 2024 at 01:08.
There is medium ocean tide on this date. Sun and Moon gravitational forces are not aligned, but meet at very acute angle, so their combined tidal force is moderate.
Lunar disc appears visually 1.1% narrower than solar disc. Moon and Sun apparent angular diameters are ∠1873" and ∠1894".
The Moon is 16 days old and navigating from the middle to the last part of the current synodic month. This is lunation 301 of Meeus index or 1254 from Brown series.
The length of this lunation is 29 days, 9 hours and 16 minutes and it is 1 hour and 4 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 3 hours and 28 minutes shorter than the mean synodic month length. It is 2 hours and 41 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 ∠36° and at the beginning of the next lunar synodic month the true anomaly is going to be ∠60.7°.
7 days since point of apogee on 17 May 2024 at 19:00 in ♍ Virgo the lunar orbit is getting narrow while the Moon is moving towards the Earth. It will keep this direction over the next 7 days until the Moon reaches the point of next perigee on 2 June 2024 at 07:23 in ♈ Aries.
The Moon is 382 748 km (237 829 mi) away from Earth and getting closer over the next 7 days until the point perigee when Earth-Moon distance is going to be 368 108 km (228 732 mi).
5 days after descending node on 19 May 2024 at 16:35 in ♎ Libra the Moon is positioned south of the ecliptic over the following 7 days until the lunar crosses the ecliptic again from South to North in ascending node on 2 June 2024 at 03:08 in ♈ Aries.
At 19:58 the Moon is meeting its standstill point to reach South declination of ∠-28.401°. Over the upcoming 13 days the lunar orbit is going to tilt northward to face maximum declination of ∠28.365° at the point of next northern standstill in ♊ Gemini on 7 June 2024 at 16:40.
19 days since the beginning of this draconic month in ♈ Aries the Moon is navigating from the second to the final part of the lunar cycle.
In 12 days on 6 June 2024 at 12:38 in ♊ Gemini the Moon is going to be in a New Moon geocentric conjunction with the Sun and thus forming the next Sun-Moon-Earth 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