Waning Gibbous on . The illuminated surface of the moon is 59% and getting smaller. The lunar cycle is 21 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 passing about ∠15° of ♐ Sagittarius tropical zodiac sector.
Previous main lunar phase is the Full Moon before 6 days on 9 March 2031 at 04:30.
Next Full Moon is the Pink Moon of April 2031 after 23 days on 7 April 2031 at 17:21.
There is low ocean tide on this date. Sun and Moon gravitational forces are not aligned, but meet at big angle, so their combined tidal force is weak.
Lunar disc appears visually 2% wider than solar disc. Moon and Sun apparent angular diameters are ∠1968" and ∠1929".
The Moon is 21 days old and navigating from the middle to the last part of the current synodic month. This is lunation 385 of Meeus index or 1338 from Brown series.
The length of this lunation is 29 days, 12 hours and 1 minute and it is 1 hour and 8 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 44 minutes shorter than the mean synodic month length. It is 5 hours and 25 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 ∠41.9° and at the beginning of the next lunar synodic month the true anomaly is going to be ∠70.3°.
12 days since point of apogee on 2 March 2031 at 18:57 in ♊ Gemini the lunar orbit is getting narrow while the Moon is moving towards the Earth. It will keep this direction over the next 2 days until the Moon reaches the point of next perigee on 17 March 2031 at 18:58 in ♑ Capricorn.
The Moon is 364 302 km (226 367 mi) away from Earth and getting closer over the next 2 days until the point perigee when Earth-Moon distance is going to be 369 634 km (229 680 mi).
1 day after ascending node on 14 March 2031 at 11:38 in ♐ Sagittarius the Moon is positioned north of the ecliptic over the following 12 days until the lunar crosses the ecliptic again from North to South in descending node on 27 March 2031 at 14:22 in ♉ Taurus.
At 19:06 the Moon is meeting its standstill point to reach South declination of ∠-21.353°. Over the upcoming 13 days the lunar orbit is going to tilt northward to face maximum declination of ∠21.242° at the point of next northern standstill in ♊ Gemini on 29 March 2031 at 04:58.
1 day since the beginning of this draconic month in ♐ Sagittarius the Moon is navigating from the beginning to the first part of the lunar cycle.
In 7 days on 23 March 2031 at 03:49 in ♈ Aries 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