The Moon tonight, at a glance
The drawing at the top is the Moon as you see it now: the white part is lit by the Sun, the pale part is in shadow. Under it you get the name of the phase, the share of the disk that is lit, and the age of the Moon, which is the time since the last new moon. Two countdowns give the next full moon and the next new moon, in your device’s time zone. The last line gives moonrise and moonset for a city: the one that matches your time zone, or any other you pick.
Tap the date to see the Moon on another day, past or future. The Calendar view shows a whole month, one small moon per day, and the Full moons view lists every full moon of a year with its traditional name.
The eight phases of the Moon
The Moon makes no light of its own. Half of it is always lit by the Sun, and what changes is how much of that lit half faces us. Four phases are exact instants: new moon, first quarter, full moon and last quarter. The four in between last about a week each.
| Phase | Lit | Rises around | Sets around |
|---|---|---|---|
| New Moon | 0% | sunrise | sunset |
| Waxing Crescent | 1 to 49% | mid morning | evening |
| First Quarter | 50% | noon | midnight |
| Waxing Gibbous | 51 to 99% | afternoon | early morning |
| Full Moon | 100% | sunset | sunrise |
| Waning Gibbous | 99 to 51% | evening | morning |
| Last Quarter | 50% | midnight | noon |
| Waning Crescent | 49 to 1% | before dawn | afternoon |
The rising times are rough: on average the Moon rises about 50 minutes later each day (50.7 minutes over 2026 in New York, by our own count), and the gap changes with the season and your latitude.
Waxing, waning, and why a “quarter” is half lit
From new moon to full moon the lit part grows: the Moon is waxing. After the full moon it shrinks: the Moon is waning. The first quarter is called a quarter because the Moon has gone a quarter of the way around its orbit. Seen from Earth, half of the disk is lit then (50.1% at each quarter of 2026).
A full lunar cycle, from one new moon to the next, lasts 29.53 days on average. The real length changes because the Moon’s orbit is an ellipse: between 1900 and 2100 the shortest cycle lasts 29.27 days and the longest 29.83 days. In 2026 and 2027 they range from 29.28 to 29.81 days.
How we calculate it
Everything is computed on your device, with no server. The phase times come from the algorithms in Jean Meeus’s Astronomical Algorithms, a standard reference for this kind of calculation. The Moon’s position, illumination and distance use the same book’s lunar theory, and moonrise is found by tracking the Moon’s height above your horizon minute by minute.
We checked the results against the U.S. Naval Observatory: all 50 phases of 2026 match to within one minute (a third of them differ by one minute, when the exact time falls close to a half minute). Times are rounded to the nearest minute. The supermoon distances match Fred Espenak’s published tables to the kilometer.
Does the phase depend on where you are?
The phase is the same for everyone at the same instant. Only the clock time changes with your time zone, and sometimes the date: the full moon of December 2026 happens at 01:28 UTC on December 24, which is 8:28 PM on December 23 in New York and 2:28 AM on December 24 in Paris.
What does change is the orientation. In the Northern Hemisphere a waxing Moon is lit on the right. In the Southern Hemisphere you see it upside down, lit on the left. The drawing flips when the city you pick is south of the equator.
Ascending and descending moon
Gardeners often speak of an ascending or descending moon. This has nothing to do with the phase. An ascending moon climbs a little higher in the sky from one day to the next, because its declination is increasing. After about 13.7 days it reaches its highest point and starts to descend. The full cycle lasts 27.3 days, two days shorter than the cycle of phases, so the two drift apart over the year. Our monthly pages give the exact turning points.
Supermoons, blue moons and moon names
A supermoon is a full moon that happens near perigee, the Moon’s closest point to Earth. We use Richard Nolle’s rule, as applied by astronomer Fred Espenak: the full moon must fall within 10% of the closest approach of its orbit. That gives three supermoons in 2026: January 3, November 24 and December 24. A blue moon is the second full moon in a calendar month (May 31, 2026), or the third of four full moons in one season (May 20, 2027).
See every date in the full moon calendar for 2026 and 2027, or open the moon calendar for November 2026. For daylight, the sunrise and sunset times work the same way, and the date calculator counts the days to any date.