Skip to content
Basetime

Moon phase today

Right now the moon is a waxing gibbous, 96% illuminated and 13.2 days into its cycle. The next full moon is Wednesday 29 July at 14:36 UTC and the next new moon Wednesday 12 August. The phase is the same for everyone on Earth at this instant — the date it falls on is not, and neither is the time the moon comes up, which is why the panel below asks where you are.

Waxing gibbous

96% lit · 13.1 days old

Moonrise
19:18
Moonset
01:22
Above the horizon
6.0 h
Distance
404,117 km
Tonight
  • Full moon Wed 29 Jul, 14:36
  • Last quarter Thu 6 Aug, 02:21
  • New moon Wed 12 Aug, 17:36
  • First quarter Thu 20 Aug, 02:46

Built · rise and set for Greenwich · an ordinary distance

The next twelve full moons

With the distance at each one, so "supermoon" stops being a word and becomes a number. The bar is the range between perigee and apogee.

Left of the bar is perigee, 356,500 km. Right is apogee, 406,700 km. Times are UTC; the local date can differ by one.

One moon, and a different night everywhere

The phase is genuinely global. The moon keeps the same face towards us and the sun lights half of it, so the fraction you can see — 96% at the moment — is the same from Santiago, Seoul and Reykjavík at the same instant. Nothing about your latitude changes it. What your latitude changes is the angle: near the equator a crescent lies on its back like a bowl, and from northern Europe the same crescent stands nearly upright.

Everything else on this page is local. Moonrise depends on where you are, and it drifts about 50 minutes later each day because the moon moves roughly 13° eastwards along the sky between one rise and the next. Over a month that adds up to a whole day, which is why the moon is an evening object for a fortnight and a morning one for the other fortnight — and why a calendar date occasionally contains no moonrise at all.

The phase instants are local too, in the sense that matters for a calendar. Full moon is a moment, not a night: the instant the moon is exactly opposite the sun. If that falls at 00:30 UTC, it is the previous evening across the Americas, and the two hemispheres will name different dates for the same event. That is the single most common cause of two moon calendars disagreeing.

The distance is the part the press exaggerates. The orbit is an ellipse: between about 356,500 and 406,700 km. A full moon near the close end is about 14% wider and 30% brighter than one near the far end, which is a real difference and completely invisible unless you can compare them side by side, which you cannot. The table above gives the figures rather than the adjective.

Every number here is computed from the astronomical series — Meeus's abridged lunar theory for the position and the periodic terms for the phase instants — rather than from a mean 29.53-day month. Real lunar months run from about 29.27 to 29.83 days, so a mean-month calculation lands the full moon on the wrong evening several times a year.

Moonrise where you might be
San FranciscoNew YorkTorontoMexico CityBuenos AiresLondonLisbonMadridBarcelonaParisBerlinOsloBergenTromsøStockholmCopenhagenTallinnAthens
How to use this
  1. The disc is drawn from the real illuminated fraction, so it changes shape every night rather than snapping between eight icons.
  2. The strip is a month of nights — tap any one to see that evening's moon, and its rise and set times.
  3. Rise and set follow your own city once the page knows it; open a city page for a permanent link.

Worth knowing: Phase instants are computed to under a minute, and rise and set to about a minute for a flat sea-level horizon. Hills, buildings and unusual refraction near the horizon all matter more than that.

FAQ

What is the moon phase today?

Waxing gibbous, 96% illuminated. That figure is the same seen from anywhere on Earth: the moon shows the same face to the whole planet at any instant, so the phase is global even though the moonrise time is not.

When is the next full moon?

Wednesday 29 July at 14:36 UTC. Because that is an instant rather than a night, the calendar date differs by time zone — a full moon at 00:30 UTC is the previous evening in the Americas.

Is the moon waxing or waning?

Waxing — growing towards full. A waxing moon is in the evening sky, rising in daylight or at dusk and setting after the sun.

When is the next supermoon?

A "supermoon" is a full moon near the closest point of the orbit. Of the next twelve, the closest is Thursday 24 December at 356,734 km, and the farthest — the one nobody writes about — is Saturday 19 June at 401,948 km. The difference in apparent width is about 14%.