The above image shows the overall idea. Click here for the 2024 calendar as a color PDF, or in black and white; or here for the 2025 calendar in color or in black and white; or here for the 2026 calendar in color or in black and white. Further calendars will be supplied when we're a little closer to those years.
So you can just grab a desired calendar at the above links and print it out on two pages; a bit of scissors work and tape gets you a two-page-high calendar for the year. You need only read the following if you'd like to tweak the calendar, generate calendars for other years, or read about why I went to the trouble of doing this.
On most non-Microsoft systems, build by running
makeI assume you can run something like cl -W4 -Ox moon_cal.c on Microsoft® Windows™ and it'll work, but I've not tried it on anything but GNU/Linux. The code is very generic, has no dependencies except for the math library, and would presumably compile/run on *BSD, OS/X, MS-DOS, Haiku, etc.
To generate a chart for a given year, run it as, e.g., ./moon_cal 2026. The result will be written to z.ps. Add the command line option -c for color. You can either view/print that, or run ps2pdf z.ps 2026.pdf to make the PDF linked to above.
By default, new and full moons, solstices and equinoxes, and a variety of holidays are shown. These are listed in date2023.txt, date2024.txt, etc. You can edit those files to change what date(s) are shown.
moon_cal.ps contains the PostScript routines used to build the calendar. Editing this, you can edit the sunday and holiday sections to change the colors used for those events. (I really just wanted Sundays and holidays to stand out a little to make navigation easier.)
I do a fair bit of work writing software for asteroid observers ("planetary defense", the folks looking for rocks that might hit the earth). There's usually about a week or so around each full moon where we can't observe much, and a few days before/after that where moonlight interferes to an annoying extent.
Some Christmases back, my sister gave me a printed calendar vaguely resembling the ones shown here. It was useful, and had better artwork than what I'm providing here. It wasn't particularly oriented to what a working astronomer might actually need (it was a bit "New Age"-ish), but it made me think about what I'd actually want to have.
The column of days of the month was on the left edge, which made it a little tricky to find the day of the month you wanted by the time you got to the end of the year. Putting it in the middle helped.
I added the 'Su Mo Tu..." to make it still easier to find the desired day, and made it possible to note other days.
The lunar month names are the traditional ones from the Maine Farmer's Almanac (I'm from Maine). The rationale is described in fullmoon.txt.
I could imagine indicating lunar and solar eclipses with some modification of the new moon/full moon symbol. Possibly even taking a chunk out of the symbol to indicate the maximum extent of the eclipse.
Somewhere or other, I've seen a chart resembling this sort, but in 'landscape' mode (days of the month run horizontally, so you have 31 columns and 12 rows instead of 12 columns and 31 rows.) That might make a nice alternative.
Some printers can take larger pieces of paper, and it might be nice to print this out on such.
I may put together an on-line service on my Web site where you would enter the desired year, then be presented with an edit box containing the default dateYYYY.txt file for that year. Edit as desired to remove stuff you don't want and to label your pet's birthday or other date(s) of interest, click 'Make Calendar', and you'd get your customized calendar without having to download and compile and run this code.