Phase notes

Waxing Gibbous

More than half lit and still filling. Gibbous is an old word for humped, which is what the lit edge does - it bulges out past the straight line of the quarter.

What you see

A lopsided moon, bright enough to read a headline by, up for most of the evening.

Next two years

The dates when the moon sits closest to the middle of this band.

The eight phases

Where the name comes from

A phase is only the angle between the sun and the moon as we see it. This one sits at 135 degrees of that angle, three eighths of the way through a cycle that runs 29.53 days.

Crescent means less than half the disc is lit, gibbous means more than half, and the quarters are the two moments in between. The quarter names count orbit, not brightness - a first quarter moon looks like a half.

Every date of the year

Three hundred and sixty-six pages, one for each date, each with the phase for that day printed year by year.