Moon position

How to use it

Search for a place, tap the map or use your location, pick the date and move the time. Times are on the place’s local clock. On the map, the thick line points to the moon at that moment and the thin ones to where it rises and sets; the curve is its path above the horizon, closer to the point the higher it is.

To find it in the sky, face the azimuth direction (with your phone’s compass, for example) and look up by the elevation in degrees: at arm’s length, a closed fist covers about 10°.

Why the moon rises about 50 minutes later every day

The moon orbits Earth in the same direction Earth spins. Each day it moves about 12° across the sky relative to the sun, so Earth has to turn a little extra, about 50 minutes on average, to bring it back to the same spot.

That’s only an average. In New York, in 2026, the moon rises between 21 and 81 minutes later from one day to the next, 51 on average. It depends on the angle at which its path meets the horizon: when that path is very shallow, as with the full moon of early fall (the harvest moon), it rises at almost the same time several nights in a row.

That’s also why once a month there’s a day with no moonrise: it rose shortly before the previous midnight and won’t rise again until just after the next one. And there’s a day with no moonset.

Phase, illumination and age of the moon

Phase

The name for what we see: new moon, waxing crescent, first quarter, waxing gibbous, full moon, waning gibbous, last quarter and waning crescent. The four main phases are exact moments; here they’re named on the day they happen.

Illumination

How much of the disk we see lit, as a percentage: 0% at new moon, 50% at the quarters and 100% at full moon.

Age

The days since the last new moon. From one new moon to the next takes 29.5 days on average.

The lit side always faces the sun. In the Northern Hemisphere, a waxing moon is lit on the right; in the Southern Hemisphere, on the left, because there we see it “upside down.” The tool draws it for the hemisphere of the place you picked.

How far away it is

The moon’s orbit isn’t a circle, so its distance changes over the month. In 2026, its closest point (perigee) is on December 24, 2026, 221,600 miles center to center, and its farthest (apogee) on December 11, 2026, 252,500 miles. The closest full moon of the year (December 23, 2026, 221,700 miles) looks 14% bigger than the farthest (May 31, 2026, 252,400 miles).

The moon looking huge when it rises is an optical illusion: near the horizon it’s actually slightly farther from you than when it’s high up, by almost one Earth radius.

How it’s calculated and how accurate it is

We work out the moon’s position with Astronomy Engine, an open-source library using a version of the ELP lunar model, from the observer’s exact spot: the moon is close enough that looking at it from the surface rather than from Earth’s center shifts it by up to a degree in the sky. The elevation includes average atmospheric refraction.

We checked it against U.S. Naval Observatory tables: 1,409 moonrises and moonsets in 2026 for Madrid and New York, never more than a minute off; all 50 main phases of 2026, also within a minute; and its position in the sky, within less than one arcminute.