July 2027 Moon Phases

July 2027 brings a Full Moon with an asterisk: the Buck Moon carries a lunar eclipse so marginal it’s barely worth the name. The month then eases toward its close with a genuinely worthwhile meteor shower. Here’s what’s happening and when.

The Buck Moon carries a barely-there eclipse

July 18 brings an extremely marginal penumbral lunar eclipse — so marginal that timeanddate.com classifies it as an “almost lunar eclipse” even though NASA’s catalog still lists it as penumbral. The Moon barely clips the outermost edge of Earth’s shadow, and the whole event lasts around 12 minutes with essentially no visible dimming at any point. It’s not visible from the Americas at all, since it happens around midday there; the regions where the Moon is above the horizon at the time are southeastern Africa, southern Asia, and Australia, and even there, most observers won’t notice anything unusual about the Moon’s appearance. It’s worth knowing about for completeness, but it’s not an event to plan around.

Why it’s called the Buck Moon

July’s Full Moon is widely known as the Buck Moon, a name tied to the time of year when male deer begin growing a fresh set of antlers, covered in velvety fur. Other names used for July’s Full Moon include the Thunder Moon, associated with the season’s frequent summer storms, and the Hay Moon, associated with the early summer hay harvest. For the fuller history and a look at how these names vary across different traditions, see our Buck Moon guide.

The Delta Aquariids ease in as the month ends

The Southern Delta Aquariid meteor shower is active from mid-July through late August, with a broad, gentle peak around the nights of July 29–31. The shower’s official Zenithal Hourly Rate is 25, but that figure assumes a perfectly dark sky with the radiant directly overhead — conditions almost nobody actually observes under. NASA’s own published estimate for rates seen under real dark skies is closer to 7 to 20 meteors an hour, and the shower favors the Southern Hemisphere, with mid-northern latitudes typically seeing the lower end of that range. The meteors are faint but steady, and they come from debris shed by comet 96P/Machholz. With the Moon waning toward the August 2 New Moon, this year’s peak falls under much darker skies than usual, which is good news for anyone hoping to catch a few. The radiant sits in the constellation Aquarius; as with most showers, you’ll see more, longer trails by looking somewhat away from the radiant rather than straight at it, in the hours after midnight and before dawn.