When Was It a Full Moon? The Last Full Moon and Every Date From the Past Year

The Last Full Moon at a Glance

Date	Monday, October 26, 2026 (Sunday, October 25 in Central, Mountain and Pacific time)
Exact full moon	12:12 AM Eastern, 11:12 PM Central, 10:12 PM Mountain, 9:12 PM Pacific
Name	The Hunter’s Moon
Moon’s sign	Taurus, at 2°46’
Sun’s sign	Scorpio
Supermoon or eclipse	Neither
The full moon before it	The Harvest Moon, September 26, 2026, in Aries
Next full moon	The Beaver Moon, November 24, 2026, in Gemini

When Was the Last Full Moon?

The Moon reached its exact full point at 04:12 Universal Time on October 26, 2026. Eastern daylight time runs four hours behind, so in New York that was 12:12 AM on Monday, October 26. Take one more hour off for each zone to the west and you land on Sunday night, October 25: 11:12 PM Central, 10:12 PM Mountain and 9:12 PM Pacific.

The exact moment is an instant, but your eyes don’t work to the minute. The National Radio Astronomy Observatory puts it plainly: the Moon can look full for upwards of three days. For the Hunter’s Moon that meant the evenings of October 25 and 26 both looked full, with the 25th the brighter of the two. Our Hunter’s Moon guide has the moonrise times and the story behind the name.

Every Full Moon of the Past 12 Months

Thirteen full moons fell between November 5, 2025 and October 26, 2026. Dates are Eastern time, and every time was checked against the US Naval Observatory’s phase table. Where we have a guide, the name links to it.

Date (Eastern)	Name and Moon sign	Exact time (Eastern, Pacific)
Nov 5, 2025	Beaver Moon, Taurus	8:19 AM, 5:19 AM
Dec 4, 2025	Cold Moon, Gemini	6:14 PM, 3:14 PM
Jan 3, 2026	Wolf Moon, Cancer	5:03 AM, 2:03 AM
Feb 1, 2026	Snow Moon, Leo	5:09 PM, 2:09 PM
Mar 3, 2026	Worm Moon, Virgo	6:38 AM, 3:38 AM
Apr 1, 2026	Pink Moon, Libra	10:12 PM, 7:12 PM
May 1, 2026	Flower Moon, Scorpio	1:23 PM, 10:23 AM
May 31, 2026	Blue Moon, Sagittarius	4:45 AM, 1:45 AM
Jun 29, 2026	Strawberry Moon, Capricorn	7:56 PM, 4:56 PM
Jul 29, 2026	Buck Moon, Aquarius	10:36 AM, 7:36 AM
Aug 28, 2026	Sturgeon Moon, Pisces	12:18 AM, 9:18 PM on Aug 27
Sep 26, 2026	Harvest Moon, Aries	12:49 PM, 9:49 AM
Oct 26, 2026	Hunter’s Moon, Taurus	12:12 AM, 9:12 PM on Oct 25

The notes behind the table:

• Supermoons. November 5, 2025 was the closest full moon of 2025, at 356,980 km. December 4, 2025 (357,219 km) and January 3, 2026 (362,312 km) also count under Fred Espenak’s rule, which takes any full moon at 90 percent or more of the way from apogee to perigee. The January one is the most distant of the three, so whether it counts depends on the cutoff you use.
• The Blue Moon. May had two full moons, on May 1 and May 31, so May 31 was a Blue Moon by the common definition: the second full moon in a calendar month. The Old Farmer’s Almanac lists it as the Blue Moon of 2026.
• Eclipses. March 3, 2026 brought a total lunar eclipse, visible from the Americas, the Pacific, Australia and east Asia. August 28, 2026 brought a partial lunar eclipse with 93 percent of the Moon’s diameter inside Earth’s shadow, visible from the Americas, Europe, Africa and the east Pacific. In Pacific time it played out on the evening of August 27.
• Dates that move with the zone. The Pink Moon was April 2 at 02:12 Universal Time, so it is April 2 in London and April 1 across the United States. The Sturgeon Moon and the Hunter’s Moon peaked a few minutes after midnight Eastern, so Central, Mountain and Pacific time saw them peak the evening before.
• Names follow the month. In the Old Farmer’s Almanac list, November’s full moon is the Beaver Moon.

Why thirteen? Full moons come 29.53 days apart on average, so twelve of them span 354.4 days, about eleven days short of a year. A 355 day window like this one has room for one extra.

Look at the signs and you’ll see them walk through the zodiac in order, Taurus to Taurus, because the Moon is always opposite the Sun and the Sun moves one sign a month. Look at the degrees and you’ll see them slip: the Taurus full moon of November 2025 was at 13°, and the Taurus full moon of October 2026 was at under 3°. A lunar month of 29.53 days is a little shorter than the 30.44 days the Sun spends in a sign on average, so each full moon lands a touch earlier in its sign than the one before.

Was It a Full Moon on That Date? How to Check Any Day

Three ways, from quick to exact.

1. Step back 29.53 days from a full moon you know. NASA’s Moon fact sheet gives the synodic month, full moon to full moon, as 29.53 days. Start at October 26, 2026, 04:12 Universal Time, and subtract 29.53 days. The 29 whole days take you to September 27 at 04:12, and the remaining 0.53 of a day (12 hours 43 minutes) takes you to September 26 at 15:29. The real Harvest Moon was at 16:49, so the estimate ran 1 hour 20 minutes early. Go twelve steps back, 354.36 days, and you land on November 5, 2025 at about 19:30 against the real 13:19: six hours off, still the right day. The gaps vary by several hours because the Moon’s orbit is not a perfect circle, so this method gives you the day, not the minute.

2. Allow a day either side. If your date falls within about a day of an exact full moon, the Moon looked full that night. That turns each exact moment into two or three full looking nights, which matters when the moment fell at 12:18 AM Eastern, as the Sturgeon Moon did.

3. For any year from 1700 to 2100, ask the Naval Observatory. The USNO’s Moon phases page takes a year and returns every phase, in Universal Time. Subtract five hours for Eastern standard time or four for Eastern daylight time, then one more hour for each zone west. Daylight time ran from March 8 to November 1 in 2026, and it always begins on the second Sunday of March and ends on the first Sunday of November.

Here is the method on the three dates people ask about most.

Is there a full moon tonight, February 17, 2026?

No. February 17, 2026 was a new moon, the opposite phase. The Naval Observatory puts it at 12:01 Universal Time, which is 7:01 AM Eastern. It came with an annular solar eclipse, the ring of fire kind, with the ring visible only from Antarctica and a partial eclipse from southern Argentina and Chile and southern Africa. None of it was visible from the United States, and the night sky had no Moon to show: a new moon is dark. The Sun and Moon sat together at about 29° Aquarius.

Is February 18, 2026 a full moon?

No. One day after a new moon the Moon is a thin waxing crescent, low in the west just after sunset. By the evening of February 18 in the United States it was about a day and a half past new, so roughly 2 to 3 percent lit. The working: 1.5 days at 12.2 degrees a day puts it 18 degrees from the Sun, and (1 minus the cosine of 18 degrees) divided by 2 is 0.025. The full moon that month was the Snow Moon on February 1, and the next one was the Worm Moon on March 3.

Was August 16 a full moon?

Not in any recent year. The August full moons fell on August 28 in 2026, August 9 in 2025 and August 19 in 2024, none of them within a day of the 16th. The last full moon on an August 16 was in 2008, at 21:16 Universal Time (5:16 PM Eastern), and it came with a partial lunar eclipse. We checked every August from 2009 to 2026 in the Naval Observatory tables, and no other full moon landed on the 16th.

What Sign Was the Last Full Moon In?

Taurus, at 2°46’, with the Sun at the same degree of Scorpio. Every full moon is in the sign opposite the Sun’s, because a full moon is the moment the Moon stands directly across from the Sun as seen from Earth, with its whole lit face turned toward us. Directly across, on the zodiac wheel, means six signs along: Scorpio Sun, Taurus Moon.

Taurus is the body, the bank balance, the garden, the things you can hold in your hand. Scorpio is what sits underneath: the debt, the desire, the thing you’d rather not name. A full moon across this axis asks one plain question: what are you holding onto for comfort, and what is it costing you? The Hunter’s Moon guide goes into the 2026 version; the point here is the pattern. Whenever the Sun is in Scorpio, roughly October 23 to November 21, the full moon is a Taurus full moon. Flip it and a Taurus Sun gives you a Scorpio full moon, like the Flower Moon on May 1.

Were You Born on a Full Moon?

Here is how to check. If your birthday is in the past year, find it in the table above. For any other year, run your birth year through the Naval Observatory page from the last section and convert the Universal Time to the zone you were born in. If you arrived within about 12 hours of the exact moment, you were born under a full moon in the astrological sense: your Sun and Moon are within about 6 degrees of exact opposition.

The 12 hours come from how fast the two move. The Moon circles the zodiac in 27.32 days, about 13.2 degrees a day, while the Sun covers about 1 degree a day. They pull apart at about 12.2 degrees a day, so in 12 hours the gap grows by about 6 degrees, close enough that we count it as an opposition.

In a chart, a Sun opposite Moon is the traditional signature of a life lived in two directions at once. What you want (the Sun) and what you need (the Moon) face each other and have to negotiate, which tends to make full moon babies sharply aware of other people and quick to see both sides of anything. The two signs tell you what the negotiation is about. These are tendencies, not rules.

The free birth chart calculator shows your Sun sign and Moon sign, so you can see whether they sit in opposite signs, our guide to reading a birth chart explains what an opposition is, and the Moon sign guide covers what the Moon’s own sign adds.

When Is the Next Full Moon?

The next full moon is the Beaver Moon on Tuesday, November 24, 2026, at 9:53 AM Eastern, 8:53 AM Central, 7:53 AM Mountain and 6:53 AM Pacific, in Gemini. It is a supermoon, about 360,800 km from Earth, and it looks full on the evenings of November 23 and 24.

For tonight’s phase and how much of the Moon is lit right now, see the Moon phase today.

New Moon vs Full Moon: The Key Differences

A new moon and a full moon are the two ends of the same cycle, about 14.8 days apart, half of the 29.53 day lunar month.

	New Moon	Full Moon
Where the Moon is	Near the Sun in our sky	Opposite the Sun
What you see	Nothing: the lit side faces the Sun	The whole lit face, rising near sunset
Signs	Moon in the Sun’s sign	Moon in the opposite sign
In the tradition	Beginnings and intentions	Peaks, results and release

NASA describes the new moon as the invisible phase, with the Moon’s lit side facing the Sun and its night side facing Earth, and the full moon as the Moon opposite the Sun as viewed from Earth, rising around sunset and setting around sunrise. In a chart the new moon is a conjunction, Sun and Moon at the same degree of the same sign, and the full moon is an opposition, the same degree of opposite signs. That is why a Scorpio new moon, like the one on November 9, is followed by a Gemini full moon rather than a Taurus one: the Sun has moved on by the time the Moon gets across.

In the astrological tradition the new moon is for planting and the full moon is for seeing what grew. Our guide to the spiritual meaning of the moon phases walks through all eight.

When Was It a Full Moon FAQ