Full Moon Names 2026-27: Beaver, Cold, Wolf Moon in IST

The next full moon is at 20:23 IST on 24 November 2026. On the month list Royal Museums Greenwich (RMG) publishes, a November full moon is the Beaver Moon; in the Indian lunar calendar the same full moon closes the month of Kartika, so it is Kartik Purnima, the day the site’s festival calendar also gives for that Purnima. The Cold Moon follows at 06:58 IST on 24 December 2026, which on US Eastern time is still the evening of 23 December. The Wolf Moon is at 17:47 IST on 22 January 2027, Paush Purnima.

Those English names belong to a modern almanac convention whose history is far less tidy than the lists suggest, and none of them is a property of the Moon. What can be computed is the dates: every full moon below is an instant from the JPL DE421 ephemeris already in the site’s calendar, the same instant at which its Purnima ends. The page then works through the questions the names raise, such as which date counts when India and America disagree, and when a “blue moon” or a “harvest moon” falls.

The Month List and Where It Comes From

RMG gives one headline name per calendar month, with alternatives beside each. It traces many of them to Native American timekeeping, taken up by colonial Americans and from there into popular culture, and it says plainly that the origin of the Beaver Moon name is disputed.

The English-language Wikipedia article on the full moon tells a more tangled story. The earliest of the claimed Native American lists it cites, from Jonathan Carver’s 1778 book of travels in North America, names lunar months that began at a new moon, not full moons, counting from the first month after the March equinox. Of Carver’s twelve names, seven (Worm, Buck, Sturgeon, Corn, Beaver, Cold and Snow) recur as RMG headline names, but not always in the same slot: in Carver’s order Cold is the eleventh month and Snow the twelfth, where RMG puts the Cold Moon in December and the Snow Moon in February. Carver’s full sequence runs Worm, Plants, Flowers, Hot, Buck, Sturgeon, Corn, Travelling, Beaver, Hunting, Cold and Snow.

The same article quotes Richard Irving Dodge, writing in 1882, that he had never met a Plains tribe with a fixed, shared name for any moon, and that two people of one tribe might name the same moon differently; he suspected that wherever twelve set names existed they had been borrowed from white settlers. The 1937 Maine Farmers’ Almanac printed a different set again, which it credited to early English ancestors, and the Farmers’ Almanac still prints month names. Wikipedia dates the wider spread of such lists in popular books to the 1990s. So the honest summary is that the names are a widely reprinted convention of uncertain origin; this page uses RMG’s version because it is one fixed, published list.

Every Full Moon From 29 October 2026 to December 2027

The last full moon before this page was at 09:41 IST on 26 October 2026, the Hunter’s Moon in RMG’s list. From the next day to the end of 2027 there are fourteen, one in each calendar month from November 2026, so each RMG name in the table is used once. The Purnima column is the lunar month that each full moon closes, and since a Purnima ends the same month whether months are counted from new moon (amanta) or from full moon (purnimanta), the name is the same in both. The Devanagari under each is the name of that Purnima in Hindi. The last column lists the site’s festival rows that end at that full moon, with the date the site gives each; the date of a vrat or festival is read at sunrise or another moment of the day, so it can be a day before the instant itself.

The names repeat a year later: the Beaver Moon of 2027 is at 08:55 IST on 14 November 2027, again Kartik Purnima, and the Cold Moon at 21:38 IST on 13 December 2027, again Margashirsha Purnima. A calendar month and a lunar month drift against each other by about eleven days a year, so a given Purnima does not keep to one calendar month from year to year, and the pairings in this table hold for these two years only. New Delhi moonrise on the evenings around each of these full moons is on the Purnima moonrise table, and the quarter moons in between on the moon phase calendar for 2027.

Which Date Is the Full Moon? India, UTC and US Eastern Time

A full moon is one instant, the moment the Moon stands opposite the Sun in longitude, and its calendar date depends on the clock. Lists published in Britain or the United States give the date on their own clocks. India runs five and a half hours ahead of UTC and nine and a half or ten and a half hours ahead of US Eastern time (daylight saving there runs from the second Sunday of March to the first Sunday of November). So an IST instant before 05:30 falls on the previous day in UTC, and one before 09:30 or 10:30 falls on the previous day in New York.

Across all 38 full moons of 2026 to 2028, the IST date differs from the UTC date seven times and from the US Eastern date fourteen times. Every UTC difference is also a US Eastern one. In the table above that means 21 Feb, 21 Apr and 16 Sep are a day earlier in UTC, and 24 Dec, 21 Feb, 21 Apr, 19 Jun, 16 Sep and 14 Nov a day earlier on US Eastern time. The Snow Moon of 2027, Magh Purnima, is 21 February in India and 20 February in UTC. The tightest case came on 30 June 2026: the full moon at 05:26 IST was 23:56 UTC on 29 June, four minutes before midnight UTC.

None of the 38 changes calendar month between the three clocks, so for 2026 to 2028 a list kept on IST gives each full moon the same RMG name as a list kept on UTC or US Eastern time, only sometimes on a different date. The full US-Eastern list of earlier dates is 2 Feb 2026, 2 Apr 2026, 30 Jun 2026, 24 Dec 2026, 21 Feb 2027, 21 Apr 2027, 19 Jun 2027, 16 Sep 2027, 14 Nov 2027, 12 Jan 2028, 11 Mar 2028, 9 May 2028, 4 Sep 2028 and 2 Dec 2028.

Blue Moons, by Two Definitions

RMG records that “blue moon” has been used in more than one way. In the sense RMG says is also applied today, it is the second full moon in one calendar month. In IST, 2026 had one: full moons on 1 May and 31 May. The next will be 31 December 2028, after one on 2 December; on US Eastern time that pair falls on 1 December and 31 December, the same month. UTC gives the same two months, so the three clocks agree on which months qualify. There is none in 2027.

The older definition RMG gives is the third full moon of a season that holds four. Taking a season as the stretch from an equinox or solstice to the next one, this page splits 2026 to 2028 into twelve seasons from the December 2025 solstice; every one holds three full moons except the season from the March equinox to the June solstice of 2027, which holds four, its first just 38 hours after the equinox. Its third, and so the seasonal blue moon, is at 16:29 IST on 20 May 2027, Vaishakh Purnima, with the site’s Buddha Purnima row on the same day. The equinox and solstice dates come from scanning the site’s Sun formula for tropical longitude; scanned for sidereal longitude, the same formula reproduces the DE421 sign ingresses to within 20 minutes, and are used here as dates only.

Harvest Moon and Hunter’s Moon, 2026 to 2028

RMG defines the harvest moon as the full moon nearest the autumnal equinox and says it usually falls in September, which is why its September entry, the Full Corn Moon, is often the harvest moon as well. The Wikipedia article adds that the hunter’s moon is the full moon after it, and that both names are Northern Hemisphere usage recorded from the early eighteenth century. Applied to the computed equinoxes:

In 2026 the harvest moon came about 4 days after the equinox, on 26 September, and the hunter’s moon was the 26 October full moon just past. In 2027 the nearest full moon comes about 7 days before the equinox, on 16 September in India (15 September in UTC), which is Bhadrapada Purnima; the hunter’s moon is then 15 October, Ashwin Purnima, a day after the site’s Sharad Purnima row of 14 October. In 2028 the order shifts: the September full moon of 4 September comes about 18 days before the equinox and the next one about 11 days after, so the harvest moon is 3 October 2028, an October full moon, and by the “next full moon” rule the hunter’s moon moves to 2 November 2028. A list that keeps the Hunter’s Moon fixed to October will disagree with one that follows the equinox in 2028.

Thirteen Full Moons in a Year

RMG puts twelve lunar cycles at about eleven days short of a calendar year, so that every two and a half years or so a thirteenth full moon fits in, and notes that this extra one has also been called a blue moon. Counted on IST dates: 2026 has thirteen, 2027 has twelve and 2028 has thirteen. UTC and US Eastern dates give the same counts. Thirteen full moons in twelve months means some month must hold two, so 2026 and 2028 are also the years of the calendar blue moons (May 2026 and December 2028), while the seasonal sense picks a 2027 full moon in a year with only twelve. The Ekadashi, Purnima and Amavasya count asks a related but different question, how many Purnimas a year holds at sunrise, and the Purnima 2027 list reads each 2027 full moon by sunrise and by its vrat evening.

What This Page Does Not Give

Nothing here gives these names a spiritual meaning, a ritual or a thing to do on the night: they are an almanac’s labels for calendar months, and nothing in a date calculation could test a claim about what a full moon means for a person. The page also makes no claim about how the Moon will look on a given night, since cloud, haze and the horizon are not in the data.

In Brief

• Beaver Moon 2026: 20:23 IST on 24 November 2026, Kartik Purnima
• Cold Moon 2026: 06:58 IST on 24 December 2026, Margashirsha Purnima; 23 December on US Eastern time
• Wolf Moon 2027: 17:47 IST on 22 January 2027, Paush Purnima
• Earlier date abroad: seven of 38 full moons in 2026 to 2028 in UTC, fourteen on US Eastern time; no change of month
• Next calendar blue moon: 31 December 2028; seasonal blue moon 20 May 2027
• Harvest moon: 26 Sep 2026, 16 Sep 2027 and 3 Oct 2028
• Thirteen full moons: 2026 and 2028

The Kartik Purnima day itself, with the Purnima window and the Dev Deepawali evening, is on the Kartik Purnima 2026 page. How far away the Moon is at each of these full moons, and which ones count as supermoons, is on the supermoon page.