Cycle Length
However, regardless of the culture, all lunar months approximate the mean length of the synodic month, or how long it takes to pass through each phase (new, half, full moon) and back again. It takes 29.53059 days (29 days, 12 hours, 44 minutes and 3 seconds). Interestingly, the moon finishes its orbit around the earth in 27.3 days, but it has not finished a full cycle until it reaches the point in its orbit where the sun is in the same position.
Read more about this topic: Lunar Month
Famous quotes containing the words cycle and/or length:
“Only mediocrities progress. An artist revolves in a cycle of masterpieces, the first of which is no less perfect than the last.”
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)
“And my spirit is grown to a lordly great compass within,
That the length and the breadth and the sweep of the marshes of
Glynn
Will work me no fear like the fear they have wrought me of yore
When length was failure, and when breadth was but bitterness sore,
And when terror and shrinking and dreary unnamable pain
Drew over me out of the merciless miles of the plain,—
Oh, now, unafraid, I am fain to face
The vast sweet visage of space.”
—Sidney Lanier (1842–1881)