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Lunar month. In lunar calendars, a lunar month is the time between two successive syzygies of the same type: new moons or full moons. The precise definition varies, especially for the beginning of the month. Animation of the Moon as it cycles through its phases, as seen from the Northern Hemisphere. The apparent wobbling of the Moon is known as ...
A lunar calendar is a calendar based on the monthly cycles of the Moon 's phases (synodic months, lunations), in contrast to solar calendars, whose annual cycles are based on the solar year. The most widely observed purely lunar calendar is the Islamic calendar. [a] A purely lunar calendar is distinguished from a lunisolar calendar, whose lunar ...
A month is a unit of time, used with calendars, that is approximately as long as a natural phase cycle of the Moon; the words month and Moon are cognates.The traditional concept of months arose with the cycle of Moon phases; such lunar months ("lunations") are synodic months and last approximately 29.53 days, making for roughly 12.37 such months in one Earth year.
The synodic month is the time it takes the Moon to reach the same visual phase. This varies notably throughout the year, [15] but averages around 29.53 days.
The traditional lunar year of 12 synodic months is about 354 days, approximately eleven days short of the solar year. Thus, every 2 to 3 years there is a discrepancy of 22 to 33 days, or a full synodic month. For example, if the winter solstice and the new moon coincide, it takes 19 tropical years for the coincidence to recur.
Lunar day. A full lunar day observed from the Earth, where orbital libration causes the apparent wobble. A lunar day is the time it takes for Earth 's Moon to complete on its axis one synodic rotation, meaning with respect to the Sun. Informally, a lunar day and a lunar night is each approx. 14 Earth days. The formal lunar day is therefore the ...
A lunar phase or Moon phase is the apparent shape of the Moon 's directly sunlit portion as viewed from the Earth (because the Moon is tidally locked with the Earth, the same hemisphere is always facing the Earth). In common usage, the four major phases are the new moon, the first quarter, the full moon and the last quarter; the four minor ...
Saros (astronomy) The saros (/ ˈsɛərɒs / ⓘ) is a period of exactly 223 synodic months, approximately 6585.321 days (18.04 years), or 18 years plus 10, 11, or 12 days (depending on the number of leap years), and 8 hours, that can be used to predict eclipses of the Sun and Moon. One saros period after an eclipse, the Sun, Earth, and Moon ...