Moon calendar for November 2026

Day by day

Key days of the month

Long nights and a very high full moon

November's full moon rides almost overhead. It always sits opposite the Sun, and the Sun is now as low as it gets, so the geometry flips - which is why a November full moon fills a bedroom at two in the morning and a June one never does. The Leonids peak on the 17th and 18th, a dozen an hour in most years; roughly every thirty-three years the shower turns into a storm, and anyone who saw 1966 still brings it up. Nightfall by half past four leaves plenty of time to look.

Beaver Moon

Beavers finish their lodges before the water freezes and trappers set the last of their lines, and the November moon took its name from both. It is a North American label for a North American economy, worth remembering before applying it to a wet field in Lincolnshire. The frost is the part that travels: Frost Moon is the other name in circulation, and in an English November it fits the ground rather better.

Asked in November

The supermoon question arrives every year about now. The word was coined in 1979 by an astrologer, Richard Nolle, not by an astronomer, and it means a full moon near the closest point of its orbit. The disc really is up to fourteen per cent wider, though almost nobody spots it without two photographs side by side - what you are reacting to in November is height, not size. Clearing out cupboards on a waning moon is the other regular, and the phase is in the table.

The Moon’s position is astronomy; the beliefs and interpretations are tradition, not scientific fact.