The Next Full Moon is the Flower, Corn, or Corn Planting Moon; the Milk Moon; the Hare's Moon; and Vesak, Buddha Jayanti, or Buddha Purnima.
The next full Moon will be on Thursday morning, May 23, 2024, at 9:53 AM EDT. This will be Friday morning from the Lord Howe Island time zone (just east of Australia) eastward across New Zealand and the Pacific to the International Date Line. The Moon will appear full for about three days around this time, from Tuesday night through early Friday evening. Thursday night the bright star Antares will appear so close to the Moon that for the Washington, DC area, the Moon will pass in front of Antares, blocking it from view, although the brightness of the full Moon will make it difficult to see the star vanish behind the Moon.
The Maine Farmers' Almanac began publishing "Indian" names for full Moons in the 1930s and these names are now widely known and used. According to this almanac, as the full Moon in May the Algonquin tribes of what is now the north-eastern United States called this the Flower Moon for the flowers that are abundant this time of year. Other names include the Corn or Corn Planting Moon.
An old English name for this Moon is the Milk Moon. In 703 AD the English monk St. Bede the Venerable wrote that what we now call May was the "Three-Milkings Month," apparently because this was the month when cows could be milked three times a day.
