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The Moon then wanes as it passes through the gibbous moon, third-quarter moon, and crescent moon phases, before returning back to new moon. The terms old moon and new moon are not interchangeable. The "old moon" is a waning sliver (which eventually becomes undetectable to the naked eye) until the moment it aligns with the Sun and begins to wax ...
The Moon is Earth's only natural satellite, orbiting at an average distance of 384 399 km (238,854 mi; 30 Earths across).It faces Earth always with the same side.This is a result of Earth's gravitational pull having synchronized the Moon's rotation period with its orbital period (lunar month) of 29.5 Earth days.
Animation of the Moon as it cycles through its phases. The apparent wobbling of the Moon is known as libration. The Moon is in synchronous rotation, meaning that it keeps the same face toward Earth at all times. This synchronous rotation is only true on average because the Moon's orbit has a definite eccentricity.
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Download as PDF; Printable version; ... First quarter moon (1 C, 2 P) ... New moon (2 C, 4 P) O. Observances by lunar phase (3 C) Pages in category "Phases of the Moon"
Due to tidal locking, the same hemisphere of the Moon always faces the Earth and thus the length of a lunar day (sunrise to sunrise on the Moon) equals the time that the Moon takes to complete one orbit around Earth, returning to the same lunar phase. While the Moon is orbiting Earth, Earth is progressing in its orbit around the Sun.
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The Lunation Number or Lunation Cycle is a number given to each lunation beginning from a specific one in history. Several conventions are in use. The most commonly used was the Brown Lunation Number (BLN), which defines "lunation 1" as beginning at the first new moon of 1923, the year when Ernest William Brown's lunar theory was introduced in the American Ephemeris and Nautical Almanac.