Most of us learned in school that there is a lunar cycle that repeats monthly (every 29.5 days). In the lunar cycle, there are different phases of the Moon that represent different quarters of the cycle (at least from earth’s vantage point of only half of the Moon’s sphere): waxing crescent, first quarter, waxing gibbous, full Moon, waning gibbous, third quarter, waning crescent, and new Moon.
However, we all know that the appearance of the Moon on any given day does not always fall neatly into one of the named phases. If you’d like to see what the Moon looks like at any given time in 2022, look no further than Dial-A-Moon which is provided to us by the NASA Scientific Visualization Studio.
Dial-A-Moon lets you see what the Moon looks like at any hour of any day, past or present, in calendar year 2022. Want to know what the Moon will look like on your birthday or on a night when you’ll be camping? Just enter the month, day, and hour in Coordinated Universal Time.
The site also provides links to many high-resolution images and videos that illustrate the Moon phases and the lesser known concepts of libration and position angle. Here’s one such example:
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