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It is not actually strawberry-coloured and in many places, it is no longer strawberry season.
The Strawberry Moon is the name traditionally given to June’s full Moon — the first full Moon of summer, rising opposite the Sun just days after the solstice, when the horizon glows long into the summer evenings.
This year it will peak at 01:57 CEST on Tuesday morning, but for most of Europe it will be visible starting this evening: around 9:41 pm in London, 22:13 in Paris, 21:55 in Berlin and Madrid.
The name traces back to Algonquian and other Native American peoples, who used June’s full Moon as a seasonal marker for the wild strawberry harvest. The Old Farmer’s Almanac picked it up and the name stuck.
It has had many other names: the Cherokee called it the “Green Corn Moon,” the Cree the “Moon When Leaves Come Out,” and the Tlingit of the Pacific Northwest the “Birth Moon,” for the animals born in the region each June. In China it is called the “Lotus Moon”.
The Europeans, characteristically, had their own version — the “Honey Moon” tied to the Anglo-Saxon tradition of mowing meadows and harvesting hives in June, not to be confused with the practice of taking time off to fly to Bali after your nuptials.
If Euronews Next threw its hat in the ring, it would be called the “Heatwave That Is Burning Us Alive Moon”.
What to expect
What you will actually see tonight is more gold than red. Hugging the southern horizon, the Moon’s light pushes through a thick wedge of atmosphere on its way to your eyes, which is the same physics that turns sunsets orange.
There is a catch: this year’s Strawberry Moon is also a micromoon, sitting roughly 406,267 kilometres from Earth or about 21,000 kilometres farther away than average.
That makes it 7% smaller and 10% dimmer than a typical full Moon. A supermoon, by comparison, is 14% wider and 30% brighter.
It is, in fact, the second-smallest full Moon of 2026, just 102 kilometres closer to Earth than last month’s Blue Moon.
It also traces one of the lowest paths across the sky in decades for Northern Hemisphere viewers, a consequence of rising just eight days after the summer solstice — when the Sun is at its highest, the Moon is pushed correspondingly low.
In the Southern Hemisphere the geometry reverses entirely: tonight’s Moon will be the highest full Moon of the year. Australians, for once, win.
There is one genuinely impressive fact buried in all this. When you look at tonight’s Moon, you are looking in the direction of the heart of the Milky Way — the Strawberry Moon sits in front of the Teapot asterism in Sagittarius, which points roughly toward the galactic centre.
Best viewing is just after sunset, when the Moon clears the southeastern horizon and the atmosphere does its golden work. It will appear nearly full tonight and tomorrow.
The strawberries, wherever you find them, are presumably excellent.
