The Lantern Festival is usually the day of the first full moon in the Lunar New Year. However, the Shanghai Planetarium said that the full moon of the first lunar month this year will appear around 1 a.m. on February 17, which is the seventeenth day of the first lunar month if the Gregorian calendar is counted. The Lantern Festival has not yet reached the point of a full moon. See ↓
As the old saying goes: The first month is the year.
The Lantern Festival is the first important festival after the Spring Festival and occupies an irreplaceable position in the minds of the Chinese people. China is a vast country, and the customs of the Lantern Festival are different throughout the country, but they are usually indispensable to several items such as moon viewing, lantern viewing, guessing puzzles, dragon dances, lion dances, and eating lanterns.
The moon rises at around 16:30 on February 15, but this year's Lantern Festival moon is not round.
(Source: Water Brother/Stellarium simulation)
The new moon, known as "Shuo" in astronomy, refers to the moon and the sun in the same direction, about 0 ° apart; the full moon, known as "look" in astronomy, refers to the angle between the moon and the sun about 180 ° apart. Strictly speaking, both Shuo and Wang refer to a certain moment. The length of a synodic monthly cycle is not so precise and stable, averaging 29.5306 days.
According to the lunar calendar, the day on which the new moon (Shuo) is located is determined as the first day of the lunar calendar. The full moon, on the other hand, may occur on any day of the fourteenth, fifteenth, sixteenth or seventeenth lunar calendar, mainly concentrated on the fifteenth and sixteenth lunar calendars, and the probability of the seventeenth full moon of the lunar calendar is about 15%. This year, in addition to this time, there will be a seventeen full moon on April 17.