02/24/2026.
Tomorrow, February 25, is another northern lunistice moonrise. It occurs just before noon. Just like a year ago, at the maximum northern lunistice moonrise of this 18.6 year cycle, it will not be visible until the moon rises about 8°. See Why You Cannot See A Moonrise During the Day.
However, if you could see it, you would notice that it's really not that far off a perfect alignment. It'll only be off 0.5°, the width of the moon. While we are now on the "downslope" of the Major Standstill, we haven't slid too far yet. This essay will try to show what that is the case.
Obviously, the main thing that determines how far north the moon rises is the famous (or is that infamous?) 18.613 year cycle, which I will combine with a similar 9.307 year cycle (that's half of 18.613 in case you didn't notice) related to the bulge of the earth. After those, a 177.84 day cycle is most important. It is driven by a nutation (wobble) of the Earth as it spins. See The Nutation at the Major Standstill. Next on the list, and one I usually ignore (and will do so here), is an 8.85 year cycle related to rotation of the axis of the ellipse of the moon's orbit. Its effect is less than 0.1°, and only shows up over a long time period.
In this graph, I am showing how those two main cycles have interacted for this Major Standstill.
The first thing to see is that the absolute peak, the "standstill", occurred on January 26, 2025. We've been on the downslope for about a year, which the blue line shows. It also shows that we have slipped about half a degree from the peak (one moon width).
The red lines shows the effect of the nutation. You can see that it pushes the moonrises further north, then pulls it further south. Note that 177.84 days is close to half a year. It "conspires" with the 18.6 year cycle to always be pushing around the equinoxes at the Major Standstill, making those moonrises more northerly than they would otherwise be. That is why we hit the most northerly last year on March 7 (close to the equinox).
Because that nutation (177.44 days) is slightly less than half a year (181.62 days), it slowly moves backwards over the years. Thus, it is now edging into February, which you can see in the above graph.
This next picture tries to show where those pushes occur, using my seasonal clock face illustration (instead of hours in a day, it shows seasons in a year). As before, start at the summer solstice and move counterclockwise through the year—but the pushes move the other direction. This is just another way to try to show the data in the first graph, but I hope it is a bit more intuitive. To me, it makes more evident why February 25, 2025 is relatively more northerly than the dates around it.
[By the way, by the time the Minor Standstill comes around, those lines will line up with the solstices for their pushes. That means that what occur at the equinoxes are pulls, pulling the northern moonrises more southerly. That also expands the span of the moon's back and forth.]
As I've also mentioned before, another thing that determines how far north the moon gets depends on "twin lunistices". See Twin Lunistices. Here it depends on the timing of how close the moonrise is to the peak of the orbit of the moon.
On the left, there are two less northerly moonrises because it misses the orbital peak. On the right, there is only one near the peak, and therefore it is more northerly.
If we put this all together, that results in the following graph, in which I have added green dots to show each individual northern moonrise (not just the theoretical curve).
You can use this if you wish to keep an eye on our slide down to the Minor Standstill in another 8 years or so.