Skip to main content

Moon phase today: What the moon will look like on August 26, 2025

An image of a full moon.

We're on day three of the lunar cycle, a series of eight unique phases of the moon's visibility. The whole cycle takes about 29.5 days, according to NASA, and these different phases happen as the Sun lights up different parts of the moon whilst it orbits Earth. 

So let's see what's happening with the moon tonight, Aug. 26.

What is today’s moon phase?

As of Tuesday, Aug. 26, the moon phase is Waxing Crescent, and only 11% will be lit up to us on Earth, according to NASA's Daily Moon Observation.

There's still not enough of the moon lit up to see anything on its surface, so keen moon gazers will need to wait a few more days before it is bright enough to see anything.

When is the next full moon?

The next full moon will be on Sept. 7. The last full moon was on Aug. 9.

What are moon phases?

According to NASA, moon phases are caused by the 29.5-day cycle of the moon’s orbit, which changes the angles between the Sun, Moon, and Earth. Moon phases are how the moon looks from Earth as it goes around us. We always see the same side of the moon, but how much of it is lit up by the Sun changes depending on where it is in its orbit. This is how we get full moons, half moons, and moons that appear completely invisible. There are eight main moon phases, and they follow a repeating cycle:

New Moon - The moon is between Earth and the sun, so the side we see is dark (in other words, it's invisible to the eye).

Waxing Crescent - A small sliver of light appears on the right side (Northern Hemisphere).

First Quarter - Half of the moon is lit on the right side. It looks like a half-moon.

Waxing Gibbous - More than half is lit up, but it’s not quite full yet.

Full Moon - The whole face of the moon is illuminated and fully visible.

Waning Gibbous - The moon starts losing light on the right side.

Last Quarter (or Third Quarter) - Another half-moon, but now the left side is lit.

Waning Crescent - A thin sliver of light remains on the left side before going dark again.



from Mashable https://ift.tt/S20yVX6
https://ift.tt/ELGJ42H
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

When the clocks change for Daylight Saving Time, and why we do it at all

The clocks on our smartphones do something bizarre twice a year: One day in the spring, they jump ahead an hour, and our alarms go off an hour sooner. We wake up bleary-eyed and confused until we remember what just happened. Afterward, "Daylight Saving Time" becomes the norm for about eight months (And yes, it's called "Daylight Saving" not "Daylight Savings." I don't make the rules). Then, in the fall, the opposite happens. Our clocks set themselves back an hour, and we wake up refreshed, if a little uneasy.  Mild chaos ensues at both annual clock changes. What feels like an abrupt and drastic lengthening or shortening of the day causes time itself to seem fictional. Babies and dogs demand that their old sleep and feeding habits remain unchanged. And more consequential effects — for better or worse — may be involved as well (more on which in a minute). Changing our clocks is an all-out attack on our perception of time as an immutable law of ...
Post a Comment
Read more

A speeding black hole is birthing baby stars across light years

Astronomers think they have discovered a supermassive black hole traveling away from its home galaxy at 4 million mph — so fast it's not doing what it's notorious for: sucking light out of the universe. Quite the opposite, possibly. Rather than ripping stars to shreds and swallowing up every morsel, this black hole is believed to be fostering new star formation, leaving a trail of newborn stars stretching 200,000 light-years through space . Pieter van Dokkum, an astronomy professor at Yale University, said as the black hole rams into gas, it seems to trigger a narrow corridor of new stars, where the gas has a chance to cool. How exactly it works, though, isn't known, said van Dokkum, who led research on the phenomenon captured by NASA 's Hubble Space Telescope accidentally. A paper on the findings was published last week in The Astrophysical Journal Letters . “What we’re seeing is the aftermath," he said in a statement . "Like the wake behind a ship, we’r...
Post a Comment
Read more