May 2027 Moon Phases

May 2027 is a quieter month on the eclipse front, but it isn’t a quiet month in the sky. The New Moon lines up almost exactly with the peak of the Eta Aquariid meteor shower, and the month brings the Flower Moon on May 20, one of the most widely recognized Full Moon names of the year. Here’s what’s happening and when.

The Eta Aquariids peak right around the New Moon

The Eta Aquariid meteor shower is active from mid-April through late May, but it reaches its peak around May 5–6, just hours before this month’s New Moon. That timing matters: with no moonlight to wash out fainter meteors, this is one of the better years to catch the shower. The Eta Aquariids are debris shed by Halley’s Comet, and they favor the Southern Hemisphere, where the shower has a Zenithal Hourly Rate (ZHR) of about 50 meteors per hour under ideal, dark-sky conditions — actual observed counts are usually somewhat lower. The Northern Hemisphere sees fewer, typically 10 to 30 an hour just before dawn, but the show is still worth staying up for. For the timing of other showers throughout the year, see our meteor shower calendar.

A few things make the difference between a good night and a frustrating one. Get away from city lights if you can; even suburban light pollution cuts the visible count sharply. Give your eyes 20 to 30 minutes to adjust to the dark, and skip the phone screen once you’re out there. You don’t need a telescope or binoculars — meteors move too fast to track through either, and wide, unaided eyes catch more of the sky. The shower’s radiant sits in the constellation Aquarius, low in the sky before dawn for Northern Hemisphere viewers, but you’ll actually see more, longer meteor trails by looking somewhat away from the radiant rather than straight at it.

The Full Moon on May 20 is the Flower Moon

May’s Full Moon is widely known as the Flower Moon. The name is widely associated with Indigenous traditions of northeastern North America and was later popularized through American almanacs, referring to the abundance of flowers that bloom across much of North America in May. Like most traditional Full Moon names, it wasn’t really naming the Moon so much as naming the month through the lens of what was happening on the ground: a bloom, a planting season, a shift in weather.

The Flower Moon isn’t the only name attached to May’s Full Moon. Various regional, Indigenous, European, and almanac traditions have called it the Corn Planting Moon or Milk Moon, tied to farm work happening around the same time, or the Hare Moon or Budding Moon, for the season’s early growth. For the fuller history and a look at how these names vary across different traditions, see our Flower Moon guide.