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.

Three bodies in a line

The Sun is not alone at 4.9° Virgo. Mercury reaches its superior conjunction with the Sun 27 Aug 2026, 17:03 UTC, 11 hours before the opposition, at 4.4° Virgo — so at the eclipse the Sun, Mercury and the Moon lie close to one line through the zodiac, Mercury on the far side of the Sun, having entered Virgo 25 Aug 2026, 11:04 UTC. 18 hours after the opposition the Sun squares Uranus exactly (28 Aug 2026, 22:18 UTC, at 5.6° Virgo and 5.6° Gemini), which puts the Moon within a degree of the same square at the eclipse.

What the instrument claims

The opposition, the eclipse maximum, the degrees, the node distance and the eclipse type — each computed from Swiss Ephemeris 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.