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Phases and aspects are usually taught as two separate systems. At 07:51 UTC this morning they are one fact. The Moon reaches eleven degrees and forty-nine minutes of Gemini while the Sun stands at eleven degrees and forty-nine minutes of Virgo, ninety degrees apart to the minute, and that is all a last quarter has ever been.
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Quartile is the older word for that ninety degrees, one of the five configurations set out in the Hellenistic material and still known by Ptolemy’s name. Squares fall between signs that share a mode but no element. Gemini is mutable and airy, Virgo mutable and earthy, and the tradition located the friction exactly there, in a relation with no shared ground beneath it. Firmicus Maternus, writing in fourth century Rome, counts the square among the hostile configurations.
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This one is partile, a term for an aspect exact within the same degree. Eleven degrees of one sign to eleven degrees of another. The tradition weighted partile aspects far above wide ones, on the reasoning that an aspect that close acts, while an aspect spread over several degrees only inclines.
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Before any of that it was a calendar marker. Half the face lit, half dark, the light decreasing, and the older writers cut the lunation into four stretches of different character rather than treating the month as one smooth curve. Forty-eight percent is lit tonight. The new Moon arrives on the eleventh, at 03:27 UTC.
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