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:
“The cycle of the machine is now coming to an end. Man has learned much in the hard discipline and the shrewd, unflinching grasp of practical possibilities that the machine has provided in the last three centuries: but we can no more continue to live in the world of the machine than we could live successfully on the barren surface of the moon.”
—Lewis Mumford (1895–1990)
“The man who, from the beginning of his life, has been bathed at length in the soft atmosphere of a woman, in the smell of her hands, of her bosom, of her knees, of her hair, of her supple and floating clothes, ... has contracted from this contact a tender skin and a distinct accent, a kind of androgyny without which the harshest and most masculine genius remains, as far as perfection in art is concerned, an incomplete being.”
—Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867)