Moon phase tonight: the true phase, the next full moon and the year’s eclipses
and tonight’s light on it.
The disc is the moon’s near side as NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter mapped it — a real photograph, projected as a sphere for the face the Earth is actually shown. The light on it is not in the photograph. The phase, the terminator, which limb is lit and the shading across the globe are worked out here, from the date and nothing else. The almanac is free to read: tonight’s moon, the next full one and the eclipses to come.
The phase is the TRUE one, taken from the angle between the moon and the sun rather than from an average month — which matters, because the two part company by up to fourteen hours, and are more than six hours apart on three nights in four. Walk a month with the scrubber, or press play and watch a whole lunation cross in half a minute.
Tonight
The moon, right now.
Tranquillitatis, Crisium on the eastern limb, Procellarum across the west and Tycho’s rays over the southern highlands, lit for this minute — with its figures, the next four phases and the year ahead.
The moon
What comes next
Eclipses are found by taking each new and full moon to its moment of least separation and measuring that against the shadow the real distances make, so the list carries every eclipse there is and invents none. Whether one can be seen from where you are standing is a different question, and this does not answer it.
Overview
The moon tonight, and the next twelve months of it.
The Moon gives tonight’s moon twice over: as a lit globe, and in figures — the fraction of the disc that is lit, the moon’s age in days, its distance in kilometres and its apparent size in arcminutes, then the next new moon, first quarter, full moon and last quarter, each to the minute. Every figure comes from Meeus’s lunar and solar theories run in your browser on the date alone. No data feed is read, so there is nothing to wait for and nothing to go down.
The year ahead lists twelve months of new and full moons and every eclipse among them. An eclipse is found rather than looked up: each syzygy is walked to its moment of closest approach and tested against the shadow sizes the real distances give that day. Over 2026 and 2027 it finds the nine eclipses in the published record — the annular solar eclipse of 17 February 2026, the total lunar eclipse of 3 March, the total solar eclipse of 12 August and the partial lunar eclipse of 28 August among them — and invents none. Where on Earth an eclipse can be seen is a question it leaves alone.
A full moon is called a supermoon here only by a rule the page states, because the word, coined by an astrologer in 1979, has no astronomical definition. Sunrise, sunset and the twilights for a hundred cities are on The Sun, the same moon beside a board of world clocks on Clockwork, and the tides it raises on Tides.
Method
What is photographed, and what is computed.
The ground
The near side comes from NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio — a global albedo map assembled from Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Wide Angle Camera imagery, with topography from the LRO Laser Altimeter. NASA imagery is not copyrighted. It is an equirectangular map, so it is projected rather than drawn: each point on the disc is turned back into a latitude and longitude and the photograph is read at that point.
It was drawn from primitives three times before this — flat shapes, then a stipple engraving of the real maria — and it never stopped looking drawn. A photograph of the moon is a hundred thousand craters at every scale, and no procedural rule reproduces that. The engraving survives: it is one press away, and on paper it prints where a photograph turns to grey.
The light
Phase, distance and the dates are Meeus’s lunar and solar theories — the moon’s position to about ten arcseconds, the phase instants to about a minute. The shading is Lommel-Seeliger, the photometric law for a dusty regolith: brightness goes as µ₀/(µ₀+µ), which is exactly one half everywhere at full moon. That is why a full moon is flat and bright right out to its edge, and why a plain cosine law — which falls to a quarter at the limb — would ring it in a shadow that is not there.
What is not modelled
Libration: the moon rocks by about eight degrees and this disc does not rock with it, so features near the limb sit where they average rather than where they are tonight. The view is geocentric, not from your own doorstep, and north is up. None of those move the phase by anything an eye could see.