Moon Phase Calendar 2027: Half Moon Dates in IST

The next half moon is a last quarter, at 01:58 IST on Monday, 2 November 2026. A first quarter follows at 17:17 IST on Tuesday, 17 November 2026 and a last quarter at 11:38 IST on Tuesday, 1 December 2026, and 2026 closes with two more, on 17 December and 31 December. Between 1 November 2026 and 31 December 2027 there are 29 half moons in all, and 2027 has 12 first quarters and 12 last quarters. Every one of them falls inside an Ashtami, the eighth tithi of its fortnight, which is why the panchang and the astronomer’s calendar point at the same tithi.

The table further down lists all 58 principal phases of that stretch in Indian time, with the tithi each half moon belongs to and the nakshatra the Moon is passing through at that moment. After it come the hours the half moon spends above the horizon at New Delhi and, for the next four, in eleven other cities, and the days on which the panchang names Ashtami, which are not always the dates of the quarters themselves.

Why a Half Moon Always Falls in Ashtami

A tithi is a 12-degree step in the Moon’s lead over the Sun. The first tithi of the bright fortnight, Shukla Pratipada, covers the Moon’s first 12 degrees past the Sun; Shukla Ashtami, the eighth, covers 84 to 96 degrees. A first quarter is the moment the lead is exactly 90 degrees, so it sits at the centre of Shukla Ashtami. The dark fortnight repeats the count from the full moon at 180 degrees, which puts the last quarter, 270 degrees, at the centre of Krishna Ashtami, the band from 264 to 276.

The same geometry gives the shape. As the Moon goes from 84 to 96 degrees ahead of the Sun, the lit part of the disc grows from about 45% to about 55% in the waxing half, and shrinks through the same range in the waning half. So for the whole of either Ashtami the Moon looks close to half lit, and the exact half falls near the middle.

Near the middle by the clock as well as by angle. An Ashtami in this window lasts anything from 21 h 55 min to 26 h 41 min, because the Moon’s speed changes over the month, but within a single tithi it barely changes. Across all 29 quarters the moment of the half moon is about 6 minutes at most from the clock midpoint between the start and end of its Ashtami. A panchang that prints the two ends of Ashtami has, in effect, given the time of the half moon to within a few minutes.

Every Phase, November 2026 to December 2027

For the new and full moons the instant is the end of a tithi rather than the middle of one: the Amavasya ends at the new moon and the Purnima ends at the full moon, which is why those rows name the tithi that closes. The day each Purnima and Amavasya is kept on, and the vrats tied to them, are on the Purnima 2027 and Amavasya 2027 lists.

The Half Moon’s Date and the Panchang’s Ashtami

A panchang names a day by the tithi current at its sunrise. Read that way, at New Delhi, 25 of the 29 half moons fall on a date the panchang calls Ashtami, and one of those Ashtamis holds two sunrises. The other four do not: in each of them the half moon comes in the evening of a day whose sunrise still belonged to Saptami, so the panchang’s Ashtami is the following date: 15 March at 21:55 (Ashtami day 16 March), 28 May at 19:27 (Ashtami day 29 May), 26 July at 22:24 (Ashtami day 27 July) and 22 October at 22:59 (Ashtami day 23 October), all in 2027.

The two-sunrise case is the first quarter of 7 October 2027, at 17:17. Its Ashtami opens at 04:13 that morning, before sunrise, and ends at 06:28 on 8 October, just after the next sunrise, so it holds two sunrises in a row: a vriddhi tithi. It is the Ashtami of the autumn Navratri, and the site’s festival table keeps Durga Ashtami 2027 on the first of the two days, the date of the half moon itself. Some other almanacs take the second, and the Navratri 2027 page sets out why. Sunrise is a little earlier in the east and later in the west, so a city far from Delhi can, near these edges, have a different Ashtami day.

When the Half Moon Is Up

A first-quarter Moon is 90 degrees east of the Sun, so it rises around the middle of the day and sets around midnight. At New Delhi in this window the first-quarter Moon rises between 10:53 and 13:41, and the evening after sunset is the part of its time above the horizon that falls in darkness. A last-quarter Moon is 90 degrees west of the Sun, so it rises around midnight and sets around the middle of the day, and it is the Moon of the early morning.

The table gives, for each half moon, the New Delhi moonrise and moonset that bracket the exact moment. Where the Moon is below the horizon at that moment, marked *, it gives the next rise and set instead. A time with a date beside it falls on another calendar day. Moonrise here is the moment the upper edge of the disc clears a level horizon, after refraction; hills and buildings to the east push the moment it clears the local skyline later, and haze can hide it for longer.

The Next Four Half Moons in Twelve Cities

The quarter is one instant everywhere, but the hours the Moon spends above the horizon around it are local. On the first quarter of 17 November 2026 the Moon rises first in Kolkata, at 11:55, and last of these twelve in Ahmedabad, at 13:00, 65 minutes later. Each cell is a rise and the set that follows it, chosen the same way as the New Delhi table above, with * where the Moon is below the horizon at the moment of the quarter.

From One Phase to the Next: 6.6 to 8.2 Days

The lunar month divided by four is a little under seven and a half days, but the step from one phase to the next is not fixed. The shortest steps are 6.6 days, for instance from the last quarter of 25 August 2027 to the new moon of 31 August, and the longest is 8.2 days, from the last quarter of 29 January 2027 to the new moon of 6 February. The Moon’s orbit is an ellipse, and it covers the same 90 degrees faster when it is near perigee, the nearest point, than near apogee. The supermoon page lists those perigees, and the same unevenness is why the Ashtamis above run anywhere from 21 h 55 min to 26 h 41 min.

Ashtami Observances and the Half Moon

Because every Ashtami holds a half moon, every Ashtami observance is a half-moon observance, whether or not anyone keeping it thinks of it that way. The next three Ashtami observances hold the three half moons listed at the top. The last quarter of 2 November lies inside the Krishna Ashtami of Ahoi Ashtami 2026, a vrat that, in the north Indian custom that page describes, is broken after dusk at the sighting of the first stars, well before this late-rising Moon is up. The first quarter of 17 November lies inside the Shukla Ashtami of Gopashtami, and the last quarter of 1 December inside the Krishna Ashtami of Kaal Bhairav Jayanti. Each of those pages works out which day the observance is kept, which turns on its own rule, not on the minute of the quarter.

The two Ashtamis recur every month: the Shukla Ashtami on the Masik Durgashtami 2027 list, and the Krishna Ashtami on the Kalashtami 2027 list. Each quarter sits in the middle of a fortnight, and the fortnights themselves are on the Shukla and Krishna Paksha dates page, and the sunrise-by-sunrise record of each Ashtami is under Shukla Ashtami and Krishna Ashtami in the tithi pages.

How These Times Were Worked Out

The phase instants come from the JPL DE421 ephemeris: a phase is the moment the Moon’s ecliptic longitude runs 0, 90, 180 or 270 degrees ahead of the Sun’s. Before writing them, the generator reproduced to the minute all 29 new- and full-moon instants of this window that the site’s calendar already carries, and matched the Moon’s sidereal (Lahiri) nakshatra at sunrise on each of the 426 days its daily panchang covers in the window. Each quarter was also checked to fall inside the Ashtami of the site’s tithi table. Times are in IST, cut to the minute. Moonrise and moonset are computed for each city’s centre, without its height above sea level.

In Brief

• Next half moon: last quarter, 01:58 IST on Monday, 2 November 2026
• Then: first quarter 17 November, last quarter 1 December
• Which tithi: always Ashtami, Shukla for the first quarter and Krishna for the last, within about 6 minutes of its midpoint
• Lit through Ashtami: about 45% to 55%
• Half moon a day before the panchang’s Ashtami: 15 Mar, 28 May, 26 Jul and 22 Oct 2027
• Phase to phase: 6.6 to 8.2 days

The crescent on the first evenings after each new moon has its own table on the Chandra Darshan page, and the full-moon evenings on the Purnima moonrise page. Today’s tithi and nakshatra at New Delhi are on the panchang tool. In Hindi: चन्द्रमा की कलाएँ 2027: आधा चाँद और अष्टमी.