Moon calendar for January 2027

Day by day

Key days of the month

January: the evening grows first

The year opens with a shower that lasts a few hours and then stops: the Quadrantids peak on the 3rd or 4th, and their radiant lies in Quadrans Muralis, a constellation abolished in 1922 that survives only as the name of this meteor stream. Meanwhile sunrise keeps sliding later until about the 4th while sunset has been drifting later since mid-December - which is why January feels stuck when the day is already growing. Sirius flashes red and green low in the south; that is our own air, not the star.

Wolf Moon

The story says wolves howled from hunger outside winter villages. Biologists have taken the edge off it: howling marks territory and holds a pack together, and January opens the breeding season, so there genuinely is more of it - just not for the reason the name implies. Old English calendars called this one the Moon After Yule, which is drier, older and considerably less atmospheric.

January questions

The first full moon of the year gets asked about before the first week is out; it is in the key days below the table, along with the new moon that most resolution-setters are actually waiting for. That part the calendar can do. Grading the numbers is another business entirely - no phase holds an opinion on whether the running shoes are still by the door in March, and any list of lucky January dates was drawn up by somebody with a page to fill. The Quadrantids take the rest of the January post, mostly from people who slept through them and want to know why a shower that strong is over in a few hours.

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