Waning Gibbous on . The illuminated surface of the moon is 97% 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 passing about ∠11° of ♋ Cancer tropical zodiac sector.
Previous main lunar phase is the Full Moon before 1 day on 11 December 2038 at 17:30.
Next Full Moon is the Wolf Moon of January 2039 after 27 days on 10 January 2039 at 11:45.
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 7.5% narrower than solar disc. Moon and Sun apparent angular diameters are ∠1808" and ∠1949".
The Moon is 16 days old and navigating from the middle to the last part of the current synodic month. This is lunation 481 of Meeus index or 1434 from Brown series.
The length of this lunation is 29 days, 11 hours and 15 minutes and it is 1 hour and 19 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 1 hour and 29 minutes shorter than the mean synodic month length. It is 4 hours and 40 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 ∠10.8° and at the beginning of the next lunar synodic month the true anomaly is going to be ∠28.2°.
4 days since point of apogee on 8 December 2038 at 13:35 in ♉ Taurus 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 24 December 2038 at 08:23 in ♐ Sagittarius.
The Moon is 396 459 km (246 348 mi) away from Earth and getting closer over the next 10 days until the point perigee when Earth-Moon distance is going to be 361 283 km (224 491 mi).
1 day after ascending node on 12 December 2038 at 16:05 in ♊ Gemini 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 25 December 2038 at 19:56 in ♐ Sagittarius.
At 13:26 the Moon is meeting its standstill point to reach North declination of ∠23.887°. This is the year's northernmost lunar standstill of 2038. Over the upcoming 13 days the lunar orbit is going to tilt southward to face maximum declination of ∠-23.882° at the point of next southern standstill in ♑ Capricorn on 26 December 2038 at 13:42.
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.
In 12 days on 26 December 2038 at 01:02 in ♑ Capricorn 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