Moon Phases Calendar

The moon has phases because it produces no light of its own. It reflects sunlight, and as it orbits Earth every 29.5 days, you see its sunlit half from a changing angle: from thin hilal to full purnima and back.

Half of the moon is always lit by the sun, just as half of Earth is always in daylight. What changes through the month is how much of that lit half happens to face India.

On amavasya (new moon), the moon sits between Earth and the sun. Its bright side points away from us, so the night stays moonless. About 15 days later, on purnima, the moon sits opposite the sun in our sky and you face its fully lit side all night.

Everything in between is a partial view: crescent, half, gibbous. The moon phase today is simply the current angle between the sun, the moon and you, and that angle shifts a little every 24 hours.

One correction, because school diagrams confuse a lot of people: Earth's shadow does not create the phases. Earth's shadow touches the moon only during a chand grahan, at most a few times a year. The regular monthly cycle is pure geometry.

So when a child asks aaj kaun sa chand hai, the honest answer is: the same moon as always, seen from a slightly different angle than yesterday. The live drawn moon at the top of this page shows you tonight's exact angle.

One complete cycle of phases, new moon to new moon, takes 29 days, 12 hours and 44 minutes on average. Astronomers call it the synodic month, and it is why every Hijri month runs either 29 or 30 days, never anything else.

A calendar can't count half days, so Islamic months round the cycle off. The decision happens on the 29th evening: if the hilal (the young crescent) is sighted after sunset, the new month begins. If clouds or geometry hide it, the running month simply completes 30 days. This rule has kept the Hijri calendar in step with the real moon for 14 centuries, and our guide to the 12 Islamic months walks through each one.

One line of astronomy for the curious: the moon actually circles Earth in 27.3 days (the sidereal month), but Earth keeps moving around the sun, so the moon needs about 2 extra days to catch the sun again and repeat the same phase. Hence 29.5.

Twelve lunar months add up to roughly 354 days, about 11 days shorter than the solar year. That's why Ramadan and Eid arrive around 11 days earlier every English year, and why the lunar date today in India never sticks to a fixed English date. The full Hijri calendar shows exactly how the 2 systems slide past each other.

A waxing moon grows fuller each night, moving from amavasya toward purnima; a waning moon shrinks back toward the next amavasya. From India, a waxing moon is lit on the right (western) side, a waning moon on the left.

There's an even easier check: the clock. If you can see the moon in the evening sky after Maghrib, it's waxing. If you spot it hanging pale in the morning sky after sunrise, it's waning.

At India's latitude the young hilal often lies tilted, almost flat like a boat above the western horizon. That's normal for the tropics; the same crescent stands more upright when seen from Europe. It's also why Indian moon-sighting committees look low in the west just after sunset.

The moon rises about 50 minutes later every day, so each phase keeps its own timetable:

So if someone asks aaj konsa chand hai and you see a bright half moon overhead at 7 pm, you can reply without opening any app: first quarter, waxing, roughly the 6th to 8th night of the lunar month.

Purnima is the Indian name for the full moon and amavasya for the new moon, about 15 days apart. In Islam, the full-moon days 13, 14 and 15 of every Hijri month are called Ayyam al-Bid, the white days.

The name is literal. On these 3 nights the moon is at or near 100% illumination and the night sky looks washed in white light.

The Prophet Muhammad ﷺ‎ recommended fasting on these 3 days. Companions including Abu Hurairah and Abu Dharr (may Allah be pleased with them) narrated this advice, and the well-known hadith reasoning is that fasting 3 days every month carries the reward of fasting the whole year, since each good deed is multiplied tenfold. These are nafl (voluntary) fasts, not fard, so missing them carries no sin.

To keep them you need the Hijri date, not the English one. Searches for moon date today islamic climb around these days for exactly this reason. Check aaj chand ki tarikh (today's Islamic date) before planning your sehri; it follows India-specific hilal sighting, which can run a day behind Saudi Arabia.

A chand grahan (lunar eclipse) can only happen on purnima, when Earth passes exactly between the sun and the moon and its shadow falls on the lunar surface. A surya grahan (solar eclipse) can only happen on amavasya, when the moon blocks the sun.

Then why isn't there a grahan every month? The moon's orbit is tilted about 5 degrees against Earth's path around the sun. Most months the full moon slips above or below Earth's shadow and nothing happens.

Only when a purnima or amavasya lands near one of the 2 crossing points of the orbits, called nodes, do the sun, Earth and moon line up. That window opens roughly twice a year, which is why eclipses arrive in seasons rather than randomly.

Muslims pray a special congregational prayer during eclipses: Salat al-Khusuf for a chand grahan and Salat al-Kusuf for a solar eclipse. When a solar eclipse coincided with the death of his son Ibrahim, the Prophet ﷺ‎ corrected the rumour that the sky was mourning: the sun and the moon are 2 signs of Allah and do not eclipse for anyone's death or birth. The prayer continues until the eclipse clears.

A supermoon is a purnima that falls when the moon is at perigee, its closest point to Earth at roughly 357,000 km. It appears up to 14% wider and about 30% brighter than a full moon at its farthest point.

In practice, 14% is hard to judge by eye. You'd need 2 photos taken with the same lens, weeks apart, to see the size difference clearly. The extra brightness is easier to feel on a clear night, especially away from city lights.

A Blue Moon is a calendar quirk: the second purnima inside one English month. Phases repeat every 29.5 days and most months have 30 or 31, so occasionally 2 full moons squeeze into 1 month. It happens about once every 2.5 to 3 years, and the moon's colour doesn't change at all.

A Blood Moon is the moon during a total chand grahan. Earth blocks direct sunlight, but our atmosphere bends the red portion of that light into the shadow, so the moon glows copper-red instead of going black. It's the same physics that turns Indian sunsets red.

The moon's gravity pulls Earth's oceans toward it, raising 2 tidal bulges. As Earth rotates through them, most Indian coasts get 2 high tides and 2 low tides roughly every 24 hours and 50 minutes.

The sun pulls too, at a bit less than half the moon's strength. On purnima and amavasya the sun and moon pull in a straight line and their effects stack up: these are spring tides, the highest highs and lowest lows of the month. On the quarter moons they pull at right angles and partly cancel out, producing weak neap tides.

You can see the scale on India's own coastline. The Gulf of Khambhat in Gujarat records tidal ranges above 10 metres on spring-tide days, among the highest in Asia, while stretches of the Tamil Nadu coast move barely 1 metre. Fishermen from Mumbai to Digha plan their launches around the same 29.5-day rhythm this whole page describes.

The table below lists this year's exact amavasya (new moon) and purnima (full moon) dates, calculated for Indian Standard Time. If you searched moon date today in India, today's row shows where you stand in the cycle right now.

Two things to remember while reading it. First, the astronomical new moon is invisible; the Islamic month begins 1 or 2 days later, when the hilal is actually sighted from India. Second, whether you type moon date today, chand today date or today moon date in India, phase timings shift by hours across time zones, so always use the IST figures for India. For how these dates set Ramadan, Eid and Muharram, see the Islamic events countdown.