Guides
The moon calendar of this month, day by day
The month below is drawn for today, in your time zone: one Moon for every day, and the four principal phases on the day their instant falls.
How to read this month
Each day's disc shows the Moon as it stands at midday, local time; from one day to the next the lit part grows through the first half of the lunar month and shrinks through the second. Four days are marked: new moon, first quarter, full moon and last quarter, each named for the day its exact instant falls in your time zone. The lunar month does not begin on the first of the calendar month, so the marked days move from month to month.
The rhythm of the month
From one principal phase to the next is a little over seven days, and a whole cycle 29.53 days. Because a calendar month is a day or two longer than that, each phase falls about one day earlier every month: a full moon on the 28th is followed by one around the 26th, then the 24th. Every two or three years the drift lets two full moons into a single month, and the second is popularly called a blue moon. February, the one month shorter than the cycle, occasionally has none at all.
The named moon of the month
Each month's full moon carries a traditional name from the farmers' almanacs of North America: Wolf, Snow, Worm, Pink, Flower, Strawberry, Buck, Sturgeon, Harvest, Hunter, Beaver, Cold. Plenilune draws each one as an engraving and tells what the almanacs recorded about it, and what they simplified. The calendar above links this month's full moon to its page.
Questions
- How many full moons are there this month?
- Usually one. The calendar above counts them for your time zone and flags a second one, the blue moon, when the month has two. It happens roughly every two to three years.
- Why does my calendar show the full moon on a different day?
- Printed and online calendars are set for one time zone. When the instant of a phase falls near midnight, the date can differ by a day from one zone to another, without either calendar being wrong. This page uses yours.
- What is the moon phase for a day next month?
- The app's calendar runs on, month after month, as far ahead as you like. On this site, the full moon calendar pages list every date of the year, and the birthday page gives the phase of any date from 1900 to 2100.