When Is the Next Full Moon 🌝 for 2024?

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This year’s Strawberry Moon will fall on Friday, June 21. That evening, the full moon will reach peak illumination at 9:08 p.m. EDT.

How to See the Next Full Moon

June’s full moon peaks after sunset on the 21st, but it will only be a few degrees above the horizon at its highest point, which happens after midnight. Happily, you don’t have to be watching at the very moment of its peak to see the whole show. Between lunar libration and the fact that the Moon appears full for a day or so before and after its peak, stargazers need not stay awake into the wee hours just to catch a glimpse. Moonrise comes at about 9 p.m. EDT on the 20th and 21st.

To get the best view of this month’s full moon, look to the southeast, an hour or so after midnight and just above the horizon.

Moon Phases For May

Here are the phases of the Moon for this lunar cycle:

🌑 New moon: June 6, 8:38 AM EDT

🌓 First Quarter: June 14, 1:18 AM EDT

🌕 Full moon: June 21, 9:08 PM EDT

🌗 Last Quarter: June 28, 5:53 PM EDT

Credit: Jack Taylor/Unsplash

Full Moon Lore: The Strawberry Moon

If May is about flowers, lunar lore for June is a song of strawberries and honey. The most common name for the June full moon is the Strawberry Moon. While its name might suggest a certain hue, the full moon in June is no more or less likely to look reddish to the eye than in any other month. A reddish or orange tint to the Moon—also called a ‘blood moon’—happens because of very fine dust, such as the fine particles from wildfire smoke, suspended in the atmosphere. The particulate absorbs blue light but lets red light through.

Instead, June’s full moon takes its most common nickname from the strawberries that reach peak ripeness in June. Even at high latitudes, by now, summer is in full swing. That means the trees are fully leafed out, and some early flowers have already bloomed—including those of strawberries, both feral and domesticated, in whose honor many a June strawberry festival is thrown. It’s possible to buy hothouse tomatoes at Christmas, but in June, early summer produce is at its peak.

June also brings the summer solstice. Falling between the 20th and 22nd of the month, the summer solstice is also commonly known as Midsummer. Summer temperatures usually don’t peak until later in the season, but the summer days are longest around the solstice, and the Sun rises early and sets late. (This is because of thermal lag from the atmosphere, which delays seasonal temperature changes by around a month after the solstice—the same reason the winter solstice is also known as Midwinter, despite that the coldest temperatures of the winter reliably show up around late January.)

Among growers, strawberries are often divided into two types, everbearing or June-bearing cultivars, which peak at different times.
Credit: Natasha Skov/Unsplash

June is traditionally the month of marriage, and it is this tradition from which we get the name and idiom of a honeymoon. The month of June is named in homage to Juno, the Roman goddess of marriage. By the time the summer solstice rolls around, the bee is in the lavender, and honey fills the comb. It only takes a couple of weeks to ferment the low-alcohol smallbeer and honey mead commonly drunk by European peasants of the past. By the time the strawberries came ripe, the year’s first golden honey was ready to be served alongside fizzy mead—perhaps at a June wedding.

June 21, 2024: the Solstice Full Moon

This year, the summer solstice is on June 20th, the day before the full moon. True to its melliferous reputation, the Moon will be an unusual honey color. It will rise just after sunset and peak after midnight, an auspicious occasion for a Midsummer bonfire. What better reason to break out the marshmallows? Try a different flavor of chocolate in your s’mores, or maybe even—heresy!—skip chocolate altogether in favor of a drizzle of honey.

Earth’s orbital inclination means that the Sun rises higher in the sky in summer and lower in the winter. However, the full moon is always opposite the Sun, and you can really tell around the solstices. The Sun crests at its greatest height on Midsummer Day, so the Moon is at its lowest yearly extreme.

2024 has a unique summer solstice full moon, though, one we won’t see again for almost another 19 years. The next time its crest is so low in the sky will be in the summer of 2042—and the reasons have everything to do with a pearl of astronomy humans have known about since the time of the ancient Greeks.

Orbital Dynamics

Lunar eclipses can only happen during full moons, also because the tidally locked full moon always opposes the Sun. But the phase alone isn’t enough to cause an eclipse; otherwise, we’d have one every month.

Why? The short answer is that we don’t get eclipses every lunar month because the Moon got tilted. No, literally. The Moon’s orbit is tilted with respect to the Earth’s, so most of the time, the Moon appears above or below the Sun. In June, with the Sun at its greatest height and the Moon at its lowest, the Moon will peak 10 full moon-widths lower in the sky than the Sun ever gets to go.

Just as the Earth’s orbital axis is inclined about 23 degrees with respect to the greater plane of the solar system, the axis about which the tidally locked Moon orbits the Earth is tilted—but at a different relative angle than Earth’s axis. (The Moon’s orbital plane is flattened back toward the ecliptic, at just a 5.1° inclination.) This means the Moon drifts north and south over the course of a lunar month, above and below its own equator. The points at which its orbit crosses the ecliptic are called nodes.

Eclipses are only possible when the Moon crosses the ecliptic. At the same time, the alignment and orientation of the Moon’s orbit aren’t fixed with respect to the Earth; they change over time in a process called precession. For an observer on Earth, lunar nodes appear to rotate west by about 19.4° per year. It’s like a hula hoop, or a Spirograph. Changing though its alignment may be, the precession of the Moon does eventually come around in a complete cycle. The combination of these two cycles adds up to a 19-year period of 223 to 242 lunar months, depending on how you define a lunar month, called a Saros cycle (or an enneadecaeteris, from the Ancient Greek ἐννεακαιδεκαετηρίς or “nineteen”).

Sacred Geometry

Celestial patterns like the Saros cycle have fascinated astronomers for thousands of years. Eclipses separated by a Saros cycle will have similar geometry, and thus, similar paths. The Moon’s dance from north to south and back again shows up in places like Stonehenge, the earliest part of which dates to about 3100 BC.

Even our calendar is based in part on lunar eclipses. Four Saros cycles put together makes one Calippic cycle: a 76-year period with a year averaging 365.25 days long, and the basis of the Julian calendar. It took another 1,600 years to refine the Julian calendar into the Gregorian calendar, a nudge that lengthened a year by less than one hour per century.

Eclipses once swayed the hand of princes, because they are both astonishing and (with some intimidating math) predictable. Saros cycles were known to the Chaldean astronomers and astrologers of Babylonia as a period when lunar eclipses seemed to repeat themselves. In other contexts, such as the making of liturgical calendars among people of the Book, the period is known as the Metonic cycle. The Saros cycle also shows up as a dial on the Antikythera Mechanism, the oldest known analog computer, which is now thought to have been a tool for predicting eclipses, made in the second century BC. 🌕