New Moon to Full Moon Duration: 1950–2050 Lunar Cycle Range

Although the mean synodic month is 29.5306 days (half of which is 14.765 days), the actual elapsed time from New Moon to Full Moon varies by 41.05 hours across 1950–2050—ranging from 13.90 days (1967-07-07 17:00 UTC to 1967-07-21 14:39 UTC) to 15.61 days (2046-12-27 10:39 UTC to 2047-01-12 01:21 UTC).

Check the current cycle on Moon phase today, find your natal phase in the birthday Moon phase calculator, or inspect the full dataset on Zenodo (DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.23837461).

New Moon to Full Moon and synodic month durations (1950–2050)

We analyzed all 4,997 principal phases in our 1950–2050 Moon phases CSV, measuring elapsed 24-hour days between consecutive New and Full Moons and complete New-to-New synodic cycles.

Why New-to-Full Moon varies more than a full synodic month

A complete New-to-New synodic month varies across a range of 13.28 hours (29.28 to 29.83 days), whereas the half-cycle from New Moon to Full Moon (or Full Moon back to New Moon) varies across 41.05 hours—more than three times as much. That happens because the Moon’s orbit around Earth is elliptical:

• When the waxing half-cycle coincides with lunar perigee (closest approach to Earth), Kepler’s second law requires the Moon to move faster in longitude, reaching the 180° Full Moon opposition in under 14 days (13.90 days minimum).
• During the second half of that same month, the waning Moon passes through apogee (farthest distance) and moves more slowly, taking over 15.5 days to return to the Sun. Across the full month, the fast perigee half and slow apogee half partially cancel out, leaving only the smaller variation caused by Earth’s own elliptical orbit around the Sun.

Earth–Moon distance extremes at Full and New Moon (1950–2050)

In popular astronomy, a Full Moon near perigee is often called a “supermoon” and one near apogee a “micromoon.” Our dataset records the geocentric center-to-center distance in kilometers at every phase instant:

Method, Zenodo archive and limits

Phase instants and distances come from Astronomy Engine SearchMoonQuarter and GeoMoon routines, stored at one-minute and one-kilometer resolution in /data/moon-phases.csv. See the Moon phase methodology.

Download the research and comparison JSON · Reproduce these tables (TypeScript source). Archived dataset: Zenodo DOI 10.5281/zenodo.23837461. Output is licensed under CC BY 4.0; credit Natal Chart Lab and link to this article.

Prepared with AI assistance and checked against calculation code and saved data. Astronomical calculations and dataset statistics do not establish astrological claims about personality, relationships or future events.