(Picture Crescent Moon over Mont-Saint-Michel and the crescent is less than 27.6 percent)
This moon phase is in Aquarius
5.2 day old moon
27.6 percent lit
4 December 2016
By Ade Ashford
Like the sweeping hand of a vast celestial clock, (click here) the Moon’s passage through some of the aquatic zodiacal constellations (Capricornus, Aquarius and Pisces) in early December brings it in close proximity to the evening planets. The lunar-Venus conjunction of 3 December is swiftly followed by an encounter with the Red Planet on 5 December (Mars and the Moon lie within a typical binocular field of view at dusk in the British Isles), but neither Venus or Mars is occulted by the Moon worldwide.
However, for the seventh and final time this year, the Moon does pass in front of Neptune, the outermost planet, on Tuesday 6 December. Weather permitting, this occultation will be seen over a swathe of the Western Hemisphere including the northeastern USA, eastern Canada, Greenland, Iceland and the western British Isles.
As seen from Reykjavik in Iceland, Neptune starts to disappear at 22:14:33 GMT, the planet’s 2.3-arcsecond-wide disc taking about 4 seconds of time to be fully occulted. Neptune lies just 9 degrees high in the southwest at the time. In the Greenland capital of Nuuk, Neptune is occulted by the Moon at 6:59pm WGT when the Moon and planet are 16 degrees high in the southern sky....
Aquarius the water bearer.
