How to put the Moon phase in your Mac menu bar (or a widget)

The easiest way to keep the Moon phase in view on a Mac or MacBook is a Moon in the menu bar, where no window can cover it. My app Orbit draws one there in tonight's phase, and hovering over it shows the percent lit. Moon by National Spork ($0.99) and Tiny Moon (free) put the phase up there too. If you'd rather have a desktop widget, you need an app that makes one (Moon Lunation, free to download, says it has them). To install nothing at all, open Apple's Weather app, which shows the phase.

On 20 October 2026, the day this went up, the Moon was a waxing gibbous, more than half lit and growing. By Orbit's engine it was 68% lit at 8 PM here in Bengaluru and 72% at 8 PM in New York. It turns full on the night of 25 to 26 October, the Hunter's Moon.

Orbit's Moon in the Mac menu bar

Orbit puts a small Moon in the menu bar in its current phase, black or white to match light or dark mode. Hover over it for the phase and the percent ("Orbit · Waxing gibbous, 72% lit" at 8 PM in New York on 20 October). The Dock icon is the same Moon.

Click either one for the briefing card. Its Moon tile gives the percent in large type, a drawing of the Moon as it looks right now, the phase name and where it is: "Up now · 34° S", "Up later tonight" or "Down tonight".

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Two Orbit briefing cards side by side. Left: New York, Tuesday 20 October, a starry night sky, Sunrise 7:13 AM, and a Moon tile reading 72%, Waxing gibbous, Up now 34° S, with the Moon lit on its right side. Right: Sydney, Wednesday 21 October, a blue daytime sky over hills, Sunset 7:13 PM, and a Moon tile reading 72%, Waxing gibbous, Up later tonight, with the Moon lit on its left side.

Your city decides only whether the Moon is up and which side looks lit. Right-click the Moon, pick Sydney under Location, and with the sky on the desktop (the default) every Moon Orbit draws turns over. In the same menu, untick Next Event in the Menu Bar to hide the label beside the Moon, such as "ISS 7:24 PM" before a visible ISS pass or "Launch in 5h 12m".

The first menu bar Moon I built, on 27 September, was full at every phase, because a see-through fill painted over a solid one stays solid. My build log let me off lightly with "nobody saw it because the Moon was full that night." Four days later I rewrote the icon. Now the dark part is drawn at 28% opacity, faint but there, so even a thin crescent still reads as a whole Moon.

Orbit 1.0's Moon has no rise or set times, no calendar of coming full moons, no age or distance and no full-moon alert.

Other Moon phase apps for the Mac menu bar (checked October 2026)

There are more of these than Google lets on; the old MoonMenu pages it serves up are from 2012 and earlier.

App	Maker	Price	What the listing offers	Needs
Moon	National Spork	$0.99	The Moon in the menu bar, the Dock or both, with its age in days or percent lit beside it; rise and set times, upcoming phases, 64,000 cities	macOS 11.5
Tiny Moon	Manuel Lopez	Free	The phase as an emoji in the menu bar, a detail view for any date, offline, no ads; last updated July 2024	macOS 13
Moonbar	Kyoo Han Bae	$0.99	The phase as an emoji; click for percent lit, distance, age, moonrise and moonset, next full and new moon; no location prompt	macOS 14.6
Lunette: Moon Phase & Sun	Khang Nguyen	$2.99, one purchase for iPhone, iPad and Mac	Tonight's Moon in the menu bar with sunrise, sunset, golden hour, visible eclipses and full moon alerts	macOS 14
Moon Lunation	TraLand.com	Free; Pro $1.99 once	A native Mac app with a sidebar, a menu bar Moon and desktop widgets	macOS 14
Orbit: Live Sky Desktop	Mad Max Labs (me)	$6.99 once	The Moon in its current phase in the menu bar and Dock, the percent in the tooltip and card, and the live sky on the desktop	macOS 15

A few other Moon apps on the store, Deluxe Moon HD and Moon Phase Gadget among them, need macOS 26 or later; everything in the table runs on macOS 15 Sequoia. For full planetarium apps, see the best astronomy apps for Mac.

How to add a Moon phase widget on a Mac or MacBook

Widgets have lived on the Mac desktop since macOS Sonoma (macOS 14, from 2023). To add one, Control-click the wallpaper, choose Edit Widgets, find the app, drag a widget into place and click Done (Apple's steps). Widgets from your iPhone's apps can appear too, if the iPhone runs iOS 17 or later, uses the same Apple Account and is nearby or on the same Wi-Fi.

You still need an app that makes a Moon widget. Of the Mac listings I checked, Moon Lunation is the one that says so outright, and it's free to download. Orbit 1.0 has no widget; its Moon lives in the menu bar and the Dock.

Does the Mac Weather app show the Moon phase?

Yes, once you open it. Apple's Weather guide for Mac says the app shows the current phase and when the next full moon is, and clicking the Moon detail opens an interactive timeline. It won't keep the Moon in view, though. Weather's menu bar item (macOS 15.2 or later) shows the current conditions and temperature, not the Moon.

I owe that app a small debt. Orbit's card was rebuilt twice on 5 October. I called the original, a grey system table, "so old fashioned and serious. Not the Fun Orbit that I made". The second rebuild was modelled on Weather's own cards, with the sky across the top, and my verdict was "wow".

For the whole year's phases at once, use a website. timeanddate's Moon phases page lists them in your city's time, and NASA's Moon Phase and Libration, 2026 shows the Moon hour by hour, with a south-up version for the southern hemisphere.

Why the Moon's phase changes, and what "percent lit" means

Half of the Moon is always in sunlight. What changes is how much of that lit half faces us as the Moon goes round the Earth, once every 29.5 days or so.

There are eight named phases: new moon, waxing crescent, first quarter, waxing gibbous, full moon, waning gibbous, last quarter and waning crescent. "Percent lit" is the share of the face we see that's in sunlight. The names trip people up here. At first quarter the Moon is 50% lit, because "quarter" means a quarter of the way round the cycle, not a quarter of the disc.

A Moon at 13% is a thin crescent.

The percent doesn't climb evenly. Orbit's numbers for 5:30 AM India time each day give 53% on 19 October and 63% on the 20th, up 10 points in a day, but 94% on the 24th and 98% on the 25th, up only 4. Near full it crawls, and it reads 100% for about a day from 9:19 PM India time on 25 October. (Computed with Orbit 1.0 on 20 October 2026.)

At any moment the phase is the same everywhere, but the two hemispheres see the Moon upside down compared with each other, which is why the Moons on the two cards above are lit on opposite sides. The date of a full moon does move with your time zone: the Hunter's Moon is full on the evening of 25 October in California and the morning of 26 October in India.

Full moons and new moons left in 2026 (with the supermoons)

Phase	Name	UTC	US Eastern	India (IST)	Supermoon?
Full	Hunter's Moon	26 Oct, 04:12	26 Oct, 12:12 AM (the night of the 25th)	26 Oct, 9:42 AM	No
New		9 Nov, 07:02	9 Nov, 2:02 AM	9 Nov, 12:32 PM
Full	Beaver Moon	24 Nov, 14:53	24 Nov, 9:53 AM	24 Nov, 8:23 PM	Yes, by the usual rule (about 360,768 km)
New		9 Dec, 00:52	8 Dec, 7:52 PM	9 Dec, 6:22 AM
Full	Cold Moon	24 Dec, 01:28	23 Dec, 8:28 PM	24 Dec, 6:58 AM	Yes, the closest full moon of 2026 (about 356,740 km)

Names are the Old Farmer's Almanac's and times are NASA's.

"Supermoon" isn't an official term. The Moon's orbit is a slightly squashed circle, so its distance changes through the month, and NASA's JPL says the word usually means a full moon that falls near the close end of that range. By that rule 24 November and 24 December qualify and 26 October doesn't, which matches BBC Sky at Night's list; timeanddate's stricter cut-off, closer than 360,000 km, counts only December.

Don't expect a giant, though. Sky at Night says the difference from neighbouring full moons is too small for the eye to see.

Orbit's desktop sky draws the Moon too. Switch on Labels on the Sky (it's off by default) and the percent sits beside it, like on this Hunter's Moon.

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A desktop-sized sky facing east in deep blue, with faint constellation lines. The Moon, full and labelled 'Moon · 100%', sits low over dark hills, Saturn is labelled to its right, Capella sits at the left edge and Fomalhaut at the right, and the compass marks NE, E and SE run along the bottom.

The Moon also decides how good the next big nights are. For the Leonids on the nights of 16 to 17 and 17 to 18 November, the half-lit Moon sets by about midnight and leaves the hours before dawn dark. For the Geminids on 13 to 14 December, a thin crescent sets between about 8 and 10 PM in northern cities. And before dawn on 2 and 30 November it passes close to Mars and Jupiter.

Which Moon app should you use on a Mac?

For a Moon and nothing else, Moon by National Spork ($0.99) knows more Moon facts than mine does, rise and set times included.

Orbit makes sense if you want the sky as well as the Moon. The desktop behind your windows becomes the real sky over your city, and the Moon in the menu bar opens a card that says whether it's up and where (what living with that is like). It's light enough to leave running: idle on my Mac mini (Apple M6, macOS 27) with the sky on the desktop, it averaged 0.04% of the CPU over five minutes and held 22 MB of memory, 33 MB with the card open (more in does live wallpaper drain battery on a MacBook?). It's $6.99 once on the Mac App Store, with no subscription and no account, for macOS 15 or later on Apple silicon and Intel; the screenshots are on the Mac page.