Live lunar tracker

Where is the Moon right now?

Locating…

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Locating the Moon…

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Phase —Illuminated —Distance —Age —

—Azimuth—

—Altitude—

—Moon rise / settoday

—Sun rise / settoday

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00:00—24:00

Your sky

Outer ring is the horizon · centre is straight overhead. Dashed arc is the Sun's path today.

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Moon—

Sun—

Separation—

Moon up?—

Find it without an app — try the 2-minute method

Estimate by hand, then check yourself against the precision engine.

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Date

Time

Goal: point at the Moon tonight using nothing but your hand. One idea, three steps, two minutes.

Last Full Moon—

Sunrise that day—

Sunset that day—

The one idea. The Moon walks almost the same path the Sun walked — just later. Each day it falls ~50 minutes further behind, and a Full Moon sits opposite the Sun, so it rises around sunset.

Your ruler. Fist at arm's length ≈ 10° of sky; one finger ≈ 2°. Your arm is the protractor — the top edge of each fist marks the next ten degrees — the ninth touches 90°:

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Tonight's shortcut: find the phase above, count the lag, and look where the Sun was that many hours ago.

Theory behind this: OpenStax Astronomy §4.5 (free textbook).

Goal: shrink the error from ±20° to about ±8° — worth it once you leave the equator or care about seasons.

Why Beginner drifts. Two things bend the sky-path: your latitude tilts everything, and the season swings the Sun ±23.5° high or low (OpenStax §4.2). The Moon mirrors that swing, flipped by phase — a Full Moon copies the Sun's opposite-season path.

Hours from peak	0	2	4	6
Height	100%	85%	50%	set

Peak time + peak height + the arch table: three numbers that beat a raw guess every time.

Keep reading. The free textbook chapter below covers exactly this — latitude, seasons, and Moon phases:

Free textbook reader — OpenStax Astronomy §4.5, Phases and Motions of the Moon · open full page

Goal: know exactly what the number on screen means — and where it can be wrong.

Sun. Mean anomaly + longitude → equation of center → apparent longitude → RA/Dec (obliquity 23.44°).
Moon. Mean elements L′, D, M, M′, F → truncated ELP-style series (10 longitude + 7 latitude terms) → ecliptic lon/lat → RA/Dec.
Your sky. Sidereal time + longitude → hour angle → alt/az, minus topocentric parallax, plus refraction above the horizon.
Phase. Moon–Sun longitude gap → illumination (1−cos)/2, age = gap/360 × 29.5306 d. Live result: .

Honest accuracy (truncated series, fine for stargazing, not navigation): phase ±2%, position ±~1°, distance ±~1,500 km. Spot-checked: 2 Oct 2026 13:28 UTC → we say 61.5% / 21.1 d / 370,099 km; published references that day say 59–67% / 20.9–21.3 d / ≈369,300 km. New-Moon test 6 Jan 2000 18:14 UTC → we say 0.0%, exact. Verify live anytime at JPL Horizons.

Read the source. The algorithm follows Jean Meeus, Astronomical Algorithms, Ch. 47 (Moon position) + Ch. 48 (illumination) — also sold by the publisher. Reference reader:

Meeus reference reader — Astronomical Algorithms, opening at p. 345 (lunar chapters) · open PDF directly

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