Daily Moon Phase

Where the names come from

The month names — Wolf, Snow, Worm, Pink, Flower, Strawberry, Buck, Sturgeon, Corn, Hunter's, Beaver, Cold — come from a mix of Native American, colonial American and European folk traditions, popularised in Britain through almanacs. They are a naming convention, not an astronomical fact.

Two of them are not simply "the full moon in that month". The Harvest Moon is the full moon nearest the September equinox, so roughly one year in three it falls in October and takes the name with it. A Blue Moon, in the modern usage, is the second full moon inside one calendar month — which happens about every two and a half years, and is where "once in a blue moon" comes from.

Times are the exact instant the moon reaches that phase, shown in GMT or BST. Unlike moonrise, this does not depend on where in the country you are.