Moon calendar for May 2027

Day by day

Key days of the month

When twilight stops closing

May's full moon skims the horizon and looks enormous doing it. That is summer geometry arriving early - a full moon sits opposite a Sun that is climbing, so it stays low and you see it through a long slab of air. From about the middle of the month the sky stops going properly dark at all, and it will not do so again until late July. The Eta Aquariids, Halley's dust once more, peak on the 5th and 6th: low from these latitudes, far better from the tropics.

Flower Moon, Milk Moon

No riddle here - everything flowers at once and the name follows. The English version is better: Milk Moon, from the Old English Thrimilcemōnaþ, the month of three milkings, when new grass let a cow be milked three times a day. Bede wrote it down in the eighth century, which makes it a great deal older than the almanac names that get quoted every month.

May questions

Photograph the full moon low over the houses, then again at midnight, and the disc measures the same. Nobody believes this until they try it - the swelling happens in the way we read distance near a horizon. Meanwhile the vegetable post arrives in bulk: potatoes, carrots and beetroot, traditionally put in on a waning moon. Weddings follow, with couples after a waxing date. Phases we can give you; promises we cannot.

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