New Moon, August 2026

A solar eclipse, measured

A new moon is the instant the Moon's longitude equals the Sun's. It becomes a solar eclipse when that conjunction falls close enough to a lunar node — the crossing of the Moon's orbit with the ecliptic — for the Moon's disc to cover the Sun's, and this one falls 10.3° from the node, which makes it total. Two times are printed because there are two events: the conjunction in longitude at 17:36 UTC, and the eclipse maximum at 17:45 UTC, 9 minutes later, when the Moon's disc is most central on the Sun's. They differ because the Moon has latitude as well as longitude. This page prints both and labels which is which.

Twenty degrees of Leo, for everyone

The Sun and Moon meet at 20.0° Leo, in the third decan of a fixed sign. The tradition reads a new moon as the seed of a month and a solar eclipse as a seed with a longer season — a degree that stays sensitive for half a year, until the next eclipse season — and reads the sign as the register the month is written in. All of that is collective. 20.0° Leo is 20.0° Leo in every chart, and the month it opens is the same month for everyone.

The same degree, a different house

What a chart adds is placement. A natal planet or angle within a degree or two of 20° of Taurus, Leo, Scorpio or Aquarius receives an exact hard contact from this eclipse — the fixed cross — and an eclipse on a natal point is the kind of dated event a journal is for. Everywhere else in the zodiac it is the month's background. The house it falls in needs a birth time and place, which is why the handoff asks for full birth details and not a date alone.

The season's second eclipse

Eclipses come in pairs a fortnight apart. This one is the solar half of the season; the lunar half is the Full Moon of 28 Aug 2026, 04:18 UTC at 4.9° Pisces, a partial lunar eclipse, on the mutable axis rather than the fixed one. Two degrees, two axes, 15 days apart — a chart with points on either is the chart this season is loudest in.

The day before

The rest of the sky is not still. Mars enters Cancer 11 Aug 2026, 08:30 UTC, 33 hours before the eclipse, while Saturn, Neptune, Pluto are retrograde. None of that changes the eclipse; it is the context the month page can carry that a table of eclipse dates cannot.

What the instrument does not compute

The path of totality — where on Earth the eclipse is total, partial or invisible — is a question of geography and the Moon's shadow, and this page does not compute it. It computes the instant, the degree, the node distance and the eclipse type from Swiss Ephemeris, and it says where the degree lands for a chart. For the map, use an astronomical source.