Real lunar data for your location
🌙 Why Track Moon Phases: The moon influences tides, gardening timing, wildlife activity, and night visibility for stargazing or astrophotography. Get today's real phase, illumination, and moonrise/moonset for your location, or browse the calendar to see any month past or future.
A full lunar cycle (new moon to new moon) takes about 29.5 days — slightly longer than the moon's actual 27.3-day orbit around Earth, because Earth is also moving around the sun, so the moon has to "catch up" a bit more each cycle.
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How It's Calculated: This calculator uses real astronomical data (Open-Meteo) to compute the moon's actual phase, illumination percentage, and rise/set times for your specific coordinates and today's date — not a fixed lookup table.
The Eight Phases: New Moon → Waxing Crescent → First Quarter → Waxing Gibbous → Full Moon → Waning Gibbous → Last Quarter → Waning Crescent. Illumination rises from 0% to 100% across the waxing half, then falls back to 0% across the waning half.
Why Location Matters: The moon's phase itself is the same everywhere on Earth on a given day, but moonrise and moonset times shift with your longitude, latitude, and local horizon — the same way sunrise and sunset do.
Example: On a night showing 92% illumination and rising illumination day over day, the moon is in the Waxing Gibbous phase, heading toward Full Moon in the next few days — a good window for nighttime visibility but a tougher one for stargazing faint objects.
This calculator uses real astronomical data from Open-Meteo, which computes the moon's position and illumination for your exact location and today's date — not an estimate or lookup table.
The percentage shows how much of the moon's visible surface is illuminated by the sun. 0% is New Moon, 100% is Full Moon, and the number rises during the waxing half of the cycle and falls during the waning half.
Like sunrise and sunset, moonrise and moonset depend on your longitude, latitude, and local horizon, so the exact times shift depending on where you are on Earth, even on the same calendar date.