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The Moon tonight in Alaska

Moonrise, moonset, and how much of the moon is lit tonight, for all 34 Alaska communities — computed live in your browser with the same astronomy as the rest of this site. All times Alaska Time.

Tonight's moon

Checking the moon…

All 34 towns tonight

TownMoonriseMoonsetLit
Anchorage………
Wasilla………
Palmer………
Houston………
Big Lake………
Willow………
Talkeetna………
Kenai………
Soldotna………
Homer………
Seward………
Valdez………
Cordova………
Glennallen………
Fairbanks………
Delta Junction………
Tok………
Juneau………
Ketchikan………
Sitka………
Petersburg………
Wrangell………
Haines………
Skagway………
Kodiak………
Bethel………
Dillingham………
King Salmon………
Unalaska / Dutch Harbor………
Adak………
Nome………
Kotzebue………
Utqiaġvik………
Prudhoe Bay / Deadhorse………

“Tonight” runs from mid-afternoon to mid-morning, so a 2:00 am moonset belongs to tonight. Some nights a town has no moonrise or no moonset: the moon comes up about 50 minutes later each day, so roughly once a month a date gets skipped entirely.

Reading the moon

The moon’s lit side always faces the sun, so the lit fraction grows from new moon (0% lit, moon and sun in the same part of the sky) through first quarter (half lit, about a week later) to full moon (100%, about two weeks after new), then shrinks through last quarter back to new — a 29.5-day round trip. A waxing moon is lit on its western (right-hand, in Alaska) side and rules the evening sky; a waning moon is lit on the east and rules the morning. The percentage shown is the lit fraction at midnight tonight.

Moonrise comes on average 50 minutes later each day — the moon falls behind the sun by that much daily — which is why the table can’t just be printed once: every town’s times are recomputed for tonight when you load this page.

Alaska adds two twists. Around the summer solstice the moon can be hard to catch at all in the far north — there’s no real darkness for it to shine in. And around a winter full moon, the far-north moon does what the midnight sun does in reverse: it circles the sky for days without setting, because a full moon sits opposite the sun and follows the sun’s polar-night path. Near a winter new moon, northern towns may not see the moon for days.

Planning a northern-lights night? A bright full moon washes out faint aurora, and moonlight is one of the four factors in every town’s verdict at our sister site, Alaska Aurora Forecast.

Times are computed with a standard lunar algorithm (the same math in your browser and in this site’s page generator) and check against U.S. Naval Observatory tables to within a few minutes. Not for navigation.