New and full moons of 2026

What this calendar is

A lunation is an instant, not a day: the moment the Moon's longitude minus the Sun's passes exactly 0° or 180°. This page finds those moments for a whole year on an hourly lattice of Swiss Ephemeris positions and interpolates each root to the minute, which is why it prints 50 times rather than 50 dates. A published table that gives days only is not wrong, but a lunation at 02:11 UTC is the evening before in the Americas, and a table that does not say which day it means cannot be checked.

The shape of 2026

Lunations come every 29.5 days and months are longer, so some years carry an extra one. 2026 has 13 full moons to 12 new moons: May opens with a full moon on 1 May 2026 at 11.3° Scorpio and closes with another on 31 May 2026 at 9.9° Sagittarius. The year also opens and closes in the same sign — the first full moon is at 13.0° Cancer and the last at 2.2° Cancer — because the lunation degree retreats through the zodiac: each new moon falls roughly 29° after the previous one, which is a degree or so short of a full sign, so over twelve months the new-moon degree slides from 28.7° of its sign to 16.9°. That drift is the year's signature, and it is the same in every chart.

Two eclipse seasons

Eclipses happen when a lunation falls near the lunar nodes, and the nodes move slowly enough that eclipses arrive in seasons about every six months. February–March brings an annular solar eclipse at 28.8° Aquarius on 17 Feb 2026 and a total lunar eclipse at 12.8° Virgo on 3 Mar 2026; August brings a total solar eclipse at 20.0° Leo on 12 Aug 2026 and a partial lunar eclipse at 4.9° Pisces on 28 Aug 2026. The tradition reads an eclipse as a lunation with a longer reach — a new or full moon whose degree stays sensitive for months — and the degrees are the useful part of that reading, because they are what a chart can be checked against.

The same instants, everywhere

Each lunation on this page happens at one moment for the whole planet and lights the same axis of the zodiac for everyone: a full moon at 13.0° Cancer is the Cancer–Capricorn axis wherever it is seen. That is the collective layer, the part a year calendar can carry. What it cannot carry is the house the lunation falls in, or whether its degree meets a natal planet — both of which change with the birth chart, and both of which are what turns a lunation from the month's weather into a marked day.

What the instrument claims

It dates 50 instants, names the degrees, flags 4 eclipses from a real eclipse search, and links each new and full moon to its own page where one exists. It does not attach an outcome to any of them.