Full Moon, December 2026

A full moon on the year's hinge

The Sun's ingress into Capricorn is the December solstice — the tropical zodiac is built so that it is — and it falls 21 Dec 2026, 20:50 UTC. 53 hours later the Moon reaches the opposite point: 2.2° Cancer against 2.2° Capricorn, exact at 01:28 UTC on 24 Dec 2026. A full moon this close to a solstice sits at the very start of the Cancer–Capricorn axis, the pair the tradition reads as home against work, the kept against the built. That the two events fall within days is a fact of this year's calendar, not a rule; the instants are what make it checkable.

Square Neptune, which is standing still

Neptune stationed direct on 13 Dec 2026 at 1.6° Aries. A planet that far from the Sun crawls for weeks either side of a station, so 11 days later it is still, to within a tenth of a degree, at that longitude — which puts it 0.6° from an exact square to the Moon at the instant of the full moon. The page can say so only because the station table is committed; it does not have Neptune's position at the lunation and does not pretend to. The tradition reads a Neptune square to a full moon as the month's culmination seen through mist — felt more than sorted — and that reading is shared by every chart.

The cold moon, everywhere at once

The full moon nearest the solstice is the Cold Moon in the traditional naming, and it rises at sunset for the whole planet on the same evening — in the north the longest night of the year, in the south the shortest. That symmetry is the collective layer: one instant, one axis, the Moon at 2.2° Cancer for every chart alike. The tradition reads the solstice full moon as the year's midwinter culmination — what the light has come down to before it turns — and reads it for the whole hemisphere at once; the degree is what makes the reading checkable against a chart rather than a mood. Mercury follows the Sun into Capricorn 25 Dec 2026, 18:22 UTC, 41 hours after the full moon.

What differs by chart

Whether 2.2° of Aries, Cancer, Libra or Capricorn carries a natal planet or angle — the cardinal cross — decides whether this full moon is an exact hard aspect or the month's weather. A natal point near 1.6° Aries has Neptune parked on it as well, which is a slower and rarer event than the lunation. The house the Moon lights depends on birth time and place, and the handoff below asks for both.

What the instrument claims

A solstice instant, an opposition instant, a station degree and the orb between them. Not the visibility, not a forecast of the holidays.