12 September 1666
Waxing Gibbous, 98% lit
The Great Fire of London
London began to burn on a night with a virtually full moon overhead.
Pepys walked out to watch it and wrote the fire lit the sky brighter than the Moon ever could. The blaze ran four days, took some 13,000 houses, and is one of the best-documented events in English history, which makes it a good test case for reconstructing a sky.
- Date
- 12 September 1666 2 September 1666 (Old Style)
- Moon computed for
- 01:00 local time, UTC
- Phase
- Waxing Gibbous
- Illuminated
- 98%
Source: Samuel Pepys, Diary