What Moon Phases and Special Moons Can I Look Up on NextFullMoon.org?

Updated

NextFullMoon.org covers the four main moon phases — full moon, new moon, first quarter, and last quarter — plus three special moon categories: supermoon, micromoon, and blue moon. You can look up any of these by day, month, or year, and for past, current, or future dates. The site also shows today's moon phase with moon age, illumination, and distance, and offers a free star map as an extra.

Main moon phases you can look up

The site's Moon Phase Calendar is built around the four standard phases:

Phase What it marks
Full moon The moon appears fully illuminated from Earth
New moon The moon is not visible from Earth
First quarter Half-lit, waxing toward full
Last quarter Half-lit, waning toward new

These four are the phases the site names explicitly as the ones you can check for any date. The homepage leads with the next full moon — an exact time and date in UTC, plus a live countdown in days, hours, minutes, and seconds.

Special moons

Beyond the four main phases, the site has a "Special Moons" section covering:

  • Supermoon — a full moon near its closest approach to Earth
  • Micromoon — a full moon near its farthest point from Earth
  • Blue moon — the extra full moon in a period that has more than the usual number

If you're checking whether a particular full moon counts as "special," these three categories are where to look.

How to reach any date

The calendar is designed so you can move to any date in a few clicks:

  1. Open a Moon Phase Calendar page.
  2. Use the previous/next buttons to step through days, months, or years.
  3. Jump directly via a yearly or monthly page — for example, the 2026 yearly calendar, or monthly pages like October 2026, November 2026, and December 2026.

This works for past, current, and future dates, so you can check the phase on a historical date as easily as an upcoming one. The site also has a "By Any Date" option and a "Were you born on a full moon?" tool for checking the moon phase on a birth date.

Today's moon data

The "Moon Phase Today" page shows real-time data rather than just the phase name:

  • Current moon phase
  • Moon age
  • Moon illumination
  • Moon distance

The homepage also displays today's moon phase alongside the next-full-moon countdown, so a single visit answers both "what is the moon doing now" and "when is the next full moon."

Extras

Two additional features sit outside the calendar itself:

  • Free star map — listed under Extras
  • Multiple languages — the site is available in English, Spanish, German, Hungarian, Portuguese, Italian, Polish, French, and Russian

One FAQ worth noting if you're using the site for general astronomy context: the site states the Moon has no permanently dark side — as it rotates, different parts of its surface experience day and night, citing moon.nasa.gov.

What this means for your query

If you need the exact time and date of the next full moon, a countdown to it, or the phase on a specific calendar date, the site covers it directly. If you're specifically after supermoon, micromoon, or blue moon designations, those have their own section. If you want current illumination and distance rather than just a phase label, the "Moon Phase Today" page provides that. The calendar's day/month/year navigation is the main reason to use it over a static phase table — you can land on any date without leaving the page structure.