New Moon, December 2026

The instant, then the week

The Moon overtakes the Sun at 16.9° Sagittarius at 00:51 UTC on 9 Dec 2026, 67.1° from the nodes and nowhere near an eclipse. That is the root of one elongation on an hourly lattice, and on its own it is a date. The reason this new moon gets an argument of its own is the station table beside it: Saturn turns direct 1.9 days later at 7.9° Aries, Neptune turns direct 4 days later at 1.6° Aries, Jupiter turns retrograde 4 days later at 27.0° Leo. Three of the five outer planets change direction inside the first week of the month this lunation opens.

What a cluster of stations is

A station is the instant a planet's apparent motion passes through zero, and for the outer planets it happens once or twice a year each, on a rhythm set by Earth's orbit rather than theirs. That they fall in the same week is a coincidence of those rhythms, not an alignment in space — but a coincidence with a measurable shape. The tradition reads a direct station as a review ending and motion resuming, a retrograde station as one beginning; a week holding 2 of the first kind and 1 of the second is a week in which the slow themes of the year change gear together, for everyone at once.

Sagittarius, second decan

16.9° Sagittarius is the tradition's mutable fire — the seed of a month spent aiming rather than tending, the far horizon over the near task. A new moon here, with Mercury newly in Sagittarius since 6 Dec 2026, is the collective register for the four weeks that follow, and it is the same register in every chart. At the instant Saturn, Uranus and Neptune are retrograde; by the end of the week that count has changed.

Where it lands

This new moon lands as an exact aspect on any natal point close to 16.9° in Gemini, Virgo, Sagittarius or Pisces; a chart with a planet at the degree of one of the week's stations has a separate, slower event running at the same time, since a planet stopping on a natal point is one of the tradition's marked moments, and the table gives the degree to check. Which house the lunar month opens in comes from the birth time and place alone — it cannot be inferred from a date, and this page does not try. Those three questions are the handoff's.

What the instrument claims

One lunation and 3 stations, each an instant, each a degree, none of them read as an outcome. The Sun's next sign change, into Capricorn, is 21 Dec 2026, 20:50 UTC.