Moons for the next few months

Notes

New moon

New moon on this page means the time, in the current orbit, when the moon’s unlit side is most exactly facing the Earth. Astronomers call this a ‘conjunction’. Sometimes this phase is referred to as a dark moon to distinguish it from the popular meaning of new moon which refers to a very thin crescent.

The timings

The timings should be pretty accurate and match, to within a minute, those shown in tables produced by more competent people than me. All times shown are GMT (UTC).

The table is recalculated the first time this page is accessed following a new moon. If you happen to be the person who makes this access the page will take a little longer than usual to load.

The moon phase image

The moon phase image shows the current phase of the moon as seen from the northern hemisphere. The image should be accurate to around 9 hours; sometimes it will be a little bit ahead, sometimes a little bit behind though around the quarters it will be more accurate. I could make it more accurate but only at the expense of placing a bigger strain on the server.

Some versions of Internet Explorer sometimes do not request a new image when the one they have in their cache expires. If the phase is obviously very wrong then reload the image manually.

Your location

A couple of people have asked if the phase of the moon and the timings change depending on where you are on the Earth.

The answer is that they don’t. For practical purposes anyway. There is a tiny effect on the phase for, say, people on opposite sides of the planet but it really is tiny. The reason is that the diameter of the Earth is small compared to the distance to the moon. The Earth is around 12800 km across. The distance to the moon is around 384000 km — around 30 times greater. The parallax is just too small to make the phase difference visible to the naked eye.

Islamic months

The Islamic month start dates can only be approximate as they depend on actual sightings of the crescent moon. Since this cannot be predicted with absolute certainty it is impossible to predict the month start dates with complete accuracy. What is shown here should be seen only as a guide.

See here for more information on this as I understand it.

Please note

I am not a Muslim and cannot answer questions about prayer times because I do not know the rules.

Further information

If you need moon phase information from outside the times shown in the table you could look at NASA’s 6000 year Moon Phase Catalog which will give you the times of New, Full & Quarter moons over a 6000 year period from 2000 BCE to 4000 CE