When Is the Next Full Moon? October's Hunter Moon, Explained

The next full Moon is the Hunter’s Moon, which will occur on Thursday, Oct. 17. That evening, the Moon will rise above the Southeastern horizon at about 6:30 p.m. EDT.

Moon Phases For October

Here are the phases of the Moon for this lunar cycle:

🌑 New Moon: Oct. 2, 2:50 p.m. EDT

🌓 First Quarter: Oct. 10, 2:56 p.m. EDT

🌕 Full Moon: Oct. 17, 7:26 a.m. EDT

🌗 Third Quarter: Oct. 24, 4:03 a.m. EDT

How to See the Next Full Moon

The full Moon technically peaks on the morning of Oct. 17, but you don’t have to be watching at the very moment of its peak to see the Moon completely full. Between lunar libration and the fact that the Moon appears full for a day or so before and after its peak, stargazers need not rise too early nor stay up too late just to catch a glimpse. Moonrise is near 6:30 p.m. EDT for several days around the full Moon, so you can see the Hunter’s Moon sailing across the evening sky from anywhere with clear evening weather.

October’s full moon will also be a “supermoon,” appearing larger and brighter than usual. “Supermoons” happen when the Moon is at or near perigee, its closest orbital approach to Earth. There are four supermoons in 2024, and the Hunter’s Moon is the third; at just over 222,000 miles from Earth, October’s full moon is also the closest approach, out of the four. The next, in November, will be the last of this calendar year.

To get the best view of the Hunter’s Moon, look to the southeast after sundown. Early risers will still be able to catch the Moon above the Western horizon before it sets, which it will do at about 7:30 a.m. EDT.

Full Moon Lore: October and the Hunter’s Moon

Sunset comes earlier every night in October, and the days are getting shorter. The branches aren’t bare yet, but the nights are getting longer, and the chill of late autumn is on its way. Historically, the Dakota marked this month’s full Moon as the Moon of Drying Rice, a nod to the ordained chore of each lunar month. To the Anishinaabe, the October lunar cycle is known as the Moon of Falling Leaves. Farther to the North, the lunar cycle of October is also known as the Freezing Moon, and if you’ve ever gone trick-or-treating with snow boots on, you know why.

October is sometimes known as the Harvest Moon—but so is September. To complicate things, the October full Moon is also sometimes called the Hunter’s Moon. This year, September’s full moon was the Harvest Moon. (September’s full moon is also known as the Corn Moon because corn is in season from coast to coast.) Next year, September will return to being the Corn Moon, and October will claim the title of Harvest Moon. Why? There’s only one Harvest Moon in a year because the Harvest Moon is defined as the full Moon that occurs closest to the autumn equinox. This year, the equinox fell on Sept. 22. That made the Sept. 17 full Moon the Harvest Moon.

Lunar cycles don’t align perfectly with the Gregorian calendar, so sometimes October’s full Moon is early in the month, and sometimes it’s toward the end. When October’s full Moon comes early, that full Moon will be the closest to the equinox, and therefore, October will have the Harvest Moon.

The reason for the moving Harvest Moon is another fun bit of science that illustrates how the Moon orbits the Earth. Normally, due to its orbital speed, the Moon rises about 50 minutes later every day. However, near the autumn equinox, all of a sudden that timing changes. For about a week around the equinox, the Moon rises just half an hour later each day. (The difference is even greater at higher latitudes.) European and early American farmers enjoyed the illumination of a seemingly cooperative full Moon, which let them work into the evening to secure the harvest.

Credit: Jack Taylor/Unsplash

The Moon’s orbit doesn’t line up perfectly with Earth’s, so every night, it moves a little further eastward through the constellations of the zodiac. If you trace the Moon’s path through space, it’s a spiral. (It looks a little like a giant Slinky. Every time the Moon orbits the Earth, it makes another loop around the Slinky.)

Lunar Cycles

Our Solar System plays host to things like eclipses and the traveling Harvest Moon because of its physical geometry. Just as the Earth’s orbital axis is inclined about 23 degrees with respect to the greater plane of the solar system, the axis about which the tidally locked Moon orbits the Earth is tilted—but at a different relative angle than Earth’s axis. (The Moon’s orbital plane is flattened back toward the ecliptic, at just a 5.1° inclination.) This means the Moon drifts north and south over the course of a lunar month, above and below its own equator. The points at which its orbit crosses the ecliptic are called nodes.

Eclipses are only possible when the Moon crosses the ecliptic. (Not all planets even have eclipses; with a smaller Moon, or one farther away, we’d just get transits.) At the same time, the alignment and orientation of the Moon’s orbit aren’t fixed with respect to the Earth; they change over time in a process called precession. For an observer on Earth, as the Moon moves to the East, lunar nodes appear to rotate West by about 19.4° per year. Changing though its alignment may be, the precession of the Moon does eventually come around in a complete cycle. The combination of these two cycles adds up to a 19-year period of 223 to 242 lunar months, depending on how you define a lunar month, called a Saros cycle (or an enneadecaeteris, from the Ancient Greek ἐννεακαιδεκαετηρίς or “nineteen”).

Sacred Geometry

Celestial patterns like the Saros cycle have fascinated astronomers for thousands of years. Eclipses separated by a Saros cycle will have very similar geometry, and thus very similar paths and appearances. The Moon’s dance from north to south and back again shows up in places like Stonehenge, the earliest part of which dates to about 3100 BC.

Even our calendar is based in part on lunar eclipses. Four Saros cycles put together makes one Calippic cycle: a 76-year period with a year averaging 365.25 days long, and the basis of the Julian calendar. It took another 1,600 years to refine the Julian calendar into the Gregorian calendar, a nudge that lengthened a year by less than one hour per century.

Phenomena like eclipses once swayed the hand of princes, because they are both astonishing and (with some intimidating math) predictable. Saros cycles were known to the Chaldean astronomers and astrologers of Babylonia as a period when lunar eclipses seem to repeat themselves. In other contexts, such as the making of liturgical calendars among people of the Book, the period is known as the Metonic cycle. The Saros cycle also shows up as a dial on the Antikythera Mechanism: the oldest known analog computer, which is now thought to have been a tool for tracking lunar cycles and predicting eclipses, made in the second century BC. 🌕