Keen skywatchers will see a Waning Gibbous Moon again tonight as the lunar cycle continues and we further away the Full Moon and closer to the New Moon. This means that the Moon will continue to appear smaller and less illuminated each night.

What is today’s Moon phase?

As of Friday, July 3, NASA’s Daily Moon Guide tracker tells us the Moon phase is in its Waning Gibbous phase, with 90% of its surface visible.

You don’t need lots of fancy equipment to see features on the Moon’s surface. In fact, you can see the Mares Imbrium and Serenitatis, as well as the Copernicus Crater without any visual aids at all. If you do however have binoculars, you’ll be able to catch a glimpse of the Clavius Crater, Mare Frigoris, and the Grimaldi Basin. And if you have a telescope, you’ll see all this plus the Apollo 14, 15, and 16 landing spots.

When is the next Full Moon?

The next Full Moon will take place on July 29.

What are Moon phases?

According to NASA, the Moon completes one orbit around Earth approximately every 29.5 days, moving through eight recognised phases along the way. Although the same side of the Moon always faces Earth, the amount of its surface illuminated by the Sun changes as it travels around our planet. As a result, the Moon appears to shift in shape throughout the month, progressing from slender crescents to quarter moons and eventually reaching the brightly lit Full Moon stage. This repeating pattern is known as the lunar cycle.

New Moon – The Moon is between Earth and the sun, so the side we see is dark (in other words, it’s invisible to the eye).

Waxing Crescent – A small sliver of light appears on the right side (Northern Hemisphere).

First Quarter – Half of the Moon is lit on the right side. It looks like a half-Moon.

Waxing Gibbous – More than half is lit up, but it’s not quite full yet.

Full Moon – The whole face of the Moon is illuminated and fully visible.

Waning Gibbous – The Moon starts losing light on the right side. (Northern Hemisphere)

Third Quarter (or Last Quarter) – Another half-Moon, but now the left side is lit.

Waning Crescent – A thin sliver of light remains on the left side before going dark again.

By Chris Snellgrove
| Published 16 seconds ago

Don’t call it a comeback; they’ve been here for years! Marvel Studios is on the cusp of a kind of renaissance. Spider-Man: Brand New Day is currently on track to earn at least $1.5 billion at the box office, a number that could go even higher with positive word-of-mouth. Meanwhile, Avengers: Doomsday is releasing near the end of the year, and that movie will be bringing in cameo characters like the X-Men while reuniting the MCU’s biggest actors: Chris Evans and Robert Downey Jr. That’s a recipe for another monster hit that may cause fans to forget how ho-hum last year was.

What happened last year? Marvel released two blockbuster summer movies: The Thunderbolts and The Fantastic Four: First Steps, each of which earned less than Superman (2025), the inaugural film of the DCU. That failure stung, and most fans assumed that we wouldn’t be getting more films in either of these Marvel franchises. However, it sounds like one of these films is going to get a sequel, and it’s not the one you suspect. According to industry scooper Alex Perez, Marvel Studios is currently working on a sequel to The Thunderbolts.

Look Who’s Back

Every month, insider Alex Perez catches fans up on the latest Marvel scoops via a Q&A session on The Cosmic Circus. One fan asked if there was any news about Doctor Strange 3, and the scooper claimed that Marvel had that film on the creative backburner. According to Perez, the studio is currently prioritizing the following projects instead: “Black Panther 3, Shang-Chi 2, Spider-Man 5, The X-Men, Thunderbolts* sequel, Blade, Midnight Sons, and the next Avengers title.” Some of these are no-brainers (like Shang-Chi 2, Spider-Man 5, and the X-Men), but others are surprising. In particular, fans were shocked to discover that a Thunderbolts sequel was in development.

Why is it so shocking that Marvel is reportedly working on a Thunderbolts sequel? It all comes down to money, of course. The first film earned $382.4 million against a budget of $180 million. That looks profitable on paper, but Variety previously reported that the movie would need to earn at least $425 million just to break even. The fact that it fell so far short of that goal means that Marvel might have actually lost over $43 million on this movie. Why, then, would the studio work on another film that is likely to lose money? 

The Gang’s All Here (For Now)

This could, effectively, be an investment in Disney+. While the first Thunderbolts was a dud at the box office, it became a massive streaming hit. In its first five days on Disney+, it got a whopping 702 million minutes viewed, making it the number one hit in 40 countries. If plenty of new fans checked out the first movie once it hit streaming, Disney may be gambling that a theatrical sequel will make more money. Alternatively, they might use the Thunderbolts sequel the way that Prime Video is reportedly using Masters of the Universe: as a way to recruit new streaming subscribers and retain old ones.

Alternatively, Marvel could (like the kids say) do it for the lore. The Thunderbolts sets up many of the big plot developments that will be unpacked by Avengers: Doomsday. One year after that film premieres, the MCU will get a reset via Avengers: Secret Wars. It’s possible that the Thunderbolts sequel will be used to set up other major events or to simply help audiences explore this brave new world. Finally, if Thunderbolts director Jake Schreier really wants to do the sequel, Marvel may just do him a favor; after all, they already have plenty of confidence in the man, having hired him to direct the MCU’s first X-Men movie. 

So far, we don’t know who will direct or even who will star in the Thunderbolts sequel, which is significant because some characters are likely to die in Doomsday and/or Secret Wars. However, it’s definitely good news that this beloved movie (it has an 88 percent critical rating on Rotten Tomatoes and a 93 percent audience rating) is getting a follow-up film. One of the most common complaints about superhero movies is that they typically follow a cookie-cutter formula. Love it or hate it, The Thunderbolts was fiercely original, and the studio could clearly use more of that pioneering spirit as they do the unthinkable and finally reboot the MCU.

TL;DR: GitMind turns PDFs, YouTube links, audio, and webpages into AI-generated mind maps, and a Basic Plan lifetime subscription is on sale for $34.99 through July 5.

Mind mapping apps usually assume you’ve already done the hard work of figuring out what the map should show. GitMind is a new AI workspace that ingests a PDF, YouTube link, audio file, or webpage and builds a finished visual map in seconds, and a Basic Plan lifetime subscription is on sale for $34.99 (reg. $169) for a few days longer.

Paste a YouTube URL into the app, and GitMind pulls the transcript, runs the words through its multimodal model, then arranges the key claims into a branching map you can drag and edit. Think of it like turning a college lecture into the professor’s handwritten chalkboard outline, without having to sit through the lecture twice. The same trick works for a 60-page PDF, where the thesis, methodology, and findings each get their own branch instead of leaving you to skim. Audio recordings get transcribed and visualized in the same pass. Screenshots and webpages feed into the same engine.

Researchers can feed in a stack of papers and pull a comparison map across them without manually outlining each one. Project managers can drop meeting notes and watch decisions, action items, and open questions sort themselves into separate branches. Content planners can paste a long-form interview transcript and get a story map back, ready to script from.

Past the mind maps, GitMind includes a chat feature for asking questions of any uploaded file, OCR for scanned documents, and diagram generation for workflows. Real-time collaboration handles multi-person editing on the same canvas. Privacy posture sets the app apart from most AI tools on the market right now, with user content kept out of model training.

Until July 5 at 11:59 p.m. PT, it’s only $34.99 to get a GitMind Basic Lifetime Plan.

StackSocial prices subject to change.