Full Moon, August 2026

Two instants for one event

A full moon is the instant the Moon's longitude is 180° from the Sun's. A lunar eclipse is the Moon passing through the Earth's shadow, which happens when that opposition falls near a lunar node. The two are the same event but not the same instant: the opposition in longitude is at 04:18 UTC and the eclipse maximum at 04:12 UTC, 6 minutes earlier, because the Moon's latitude carries it through the shadow's centre-line a little before its longitude reaches the opposition. Both are real. Almanacs print the maximum; ephemerides print the opposition; this page prints both and says which is which.

An early mutable degree

The Moon stands at 4.9° Pisces, 5 degrees into a mutable sign, with the Sun at 4.9° Virgo. The Pisces–Virgo axis is the one the tradition reads as dissolution against discrimination — what is felt whole against what is sorted into parts — and a full moon holds both ends up at once. As an eclipse, the reading stretches from a fortnight to a season. This is the collective layer: the same axis, the same degree, for every chart.

The same instant, a different chart

Placement is what changes. A natal planet or angle in the first degrees of Gemini, Virgo, Sagittarius or Pisces — the mutable cross — receives an exact hard contact from this eclipse; a chart with nothing there gets the month's weather. The house the Moon falls in needs a birth time and place, which is why the handoff below asks for full birth details. With them, an eclipse on a natal point is a dated event; without them it is a degree.

The slow arcs it fell inside

Mercury had crossed into Virgo 65 hours earlier (25 Aug 2026, 11:04 UTC), so the Sun's end of the axis carried two bodies by the time the Earth's shadow reached the Moon. Three of the bodies that retrograde had already turned back, and the eclipse ended none of them: Pluto stationed 6 May 2026 at 5.5° Aquarius, Saturn stationed 26 Jul 2026 at 14.7° Aries, Neptune stationed 7 Jul 2026 at 4.4° Aries. The soonest of the three did not turn direct for another 49 days. That is a lunation against its background — an instant fixed to the minute, falling inside arcs measured in months, none of which it moved.

What the instrument claims

The opposition, the eclipse maximum, the degrees, the node distance and the eclipse type — each computed with Skyfield from JPL DE440 and printed to the minute. Not the visibility (a lunar eclipse is visible from wherever the Moon is above the horizon at the time, which this page does not map), and not an outcome.