The Sky Above You, August 2026
by Duncan Lunan
After Full Moon on July 29th, the Moon is New on August 12th and Full on August 28th. Meanwhile it passes Saturn on August 3rd, Mercury on the 11th, and totally eclipses the Sun from Greenland, western Ireland, and from Spain to Majorca on the 12th, the first total eclipse in Europe in 27 years, partial over all of the UK and Ireland after 7 p.m.. That night will be particularly good for Perseid meteors (see below), though nowhere near their peak which last occurred in 1993. After New Moon the Moon is near Venus on the 15th and 16th, and there is a partial lunar eclipse peaking at 5.14 a.m. on the 28th.
The revised schedule for the US return to the Moon is gathering momentum under the new Director Jared Isaacman, originally discounted for the position by Donald Trump. The new plan calls for a rendezvous mission between the crewed Orion capsule and two candidate landers produced by Elon Musk’s SpaceX and its Blue Origin rival. The mission will require near-simultaneous launches by the Artemis booster, SpaceX’s Starship and Blue Origin’s New Glenn, to put all three spacecraft into Earth orbit at once, for compatibility tests before choosing which lander to use for the first crewed lunar landing in 2028. Neither lander is yet anywhere near flight readiness, but the race is on to beat a Chinese landing – currently scheduled for 2030, but that may well be brought forward.
The planet Mercury passes greatest separation from the Sun on August 2nd and through the cluster Praesepe in Cancer on the morning of the 14th, and it’s near Jupiter the following morning, but both events will be in twilight.
Venus remains brilliant but gets lower in the evening sky, paired with the crescent Moon on August 15th, when Venus is at its furthest from the Sun, and still nearby the following night.
Mars moves from Taurus into Gemini mid-month, passed by the waning Moon on August 9th, and just below the star cluster M35 on the 15th.
Continuing study of data from NASA’s Insight lander, ending in 2022, has revealed a widespread discontinuity in the Martian crust, from mafic to ultramafic rock, about 24 km down and probably extending for hundreds or thousands of kilometres, possibly planet-wide, above the planet’s geological mantle. Similar formations are found in the Earth’s crust, under volcanoes, but were not expected given the absence of continental plates on Mars. If the interior of Mars is largely different from Earth’s, it raises the possibility of sub-surface water and even life. (Evan Gough, ‘Mars May Have Vast Magma Systems Below Its Surface’, Universe Today, June 29th 2026.)
Jupiter reappears mid-month in Cancer, rising at 4.30 a.m..
Saturn in Pisces rises at 10 p.m., passed by the Moon on August 3rd.
Uranus, in Taurus, rises at 11.30 p.m..
Neptune in Pisces, rises at 9.30 p.m..
In mid-July NASA scientists announced a remarkable new find: detection of a previously unknown compound on the surfaces of Titan, the largest moon of Saturn, and Pluto, Titan is comparable in size with Mercury and would be classified as a planet if it was in free orbit; Pluto is no longer classed as a planet, but a growing body of opinion maintains that the definitions used by the International Astronomical Union need to be revised to reinstate it. The argument is further complicated by the announcement in July 2026 that both bodies have a chemical compound on their surfaces which has no counterpart on Earth, or elsewhere as fas we know, but has now been identified on both sub-planetary bodies by the James Webb Space Telescope. (Paul Scott Anderson, ‘Titan and Pluto Share Same Mysterious Molecule: What Is It?’, EarthSky, July 15th 2026.) The announcement is all the more surprising because the two bodies are different in size, chemical composition and distance from the Sun; the only clue at this stage is that they both have temperatures within 100 degrees of Absolute Zero, and the search is on to find what else they have in common that other worlds appear to lack.
The Perseid meteor shower peaks on the 12th and although there is no Moon to spoil it this year, there’s a better chance to see them after 1 a.m. that night and the following one, as the Earth turns to meet the oncoming particles of the shower. The Perseids come from Comet Swift-Tuttle, which has an orbital period of 130 years. The last Perseid peak was 1991-93, so we have 100 years to wait for the next major display, but it’s still worth watching.
Duncan Lunan’s recent books are available from booksellers; details are on Duncan’s website, www.duncanlunan.com.
The Sky Above You
By Duncan Lunan
About this Column
I began writing this column in early 1983 at the suggestion of the late Chris Boyce. At that time the Post Office would allow 1000 free mailings to start a new business, just under the number of small press newspapers in the UK at the time. I printed a flyer with the help of John Braithwaite (of Braithwaite Telescopes) offering a three-part column for £5, with the sky this month, a series of articles for beginners, and a monthly news feature. The column ran from May 1983 to May 1993 in various newspapers and magazines, but never in more than five outlets at a time, although every one of those 1000-plus papers would have included an astrology column. Since then it’s appeared sporadically in a range of publications including The Southsider in Glasgow and the Dalyan Courier in Turkey, but most often, normally three times per year, in Jeff Hawke’s Cosmos from the first issue in March 2003 until the last in January 2018, with a last piece in “Jeff Hawke, The Epilogue” (Jeff Hawke Club, 2020). It continues to appear monthly in Troon's Going Out and Orkney News, with an expanded version broadcast monthly on Arransound Radio since August 2023
The monthly maps for the column were drawn for me by Jim Barker, based on similar, uncredited ones in Dr. Leon Hausman’s “Astronomy Handbook” (Fawcett Publications, 1956). Jim had to redraw or elongate several of them because they were drawn for mid-US latitudes, about 40 degrees North, making them usable over most of the northern hemisphere. The biggest change needed was in November when only Dubhe, Merak and Megrez of the Big Dipper, as the US version called it, were visible at that latitude. In the UK, all the stars of the Plough are circumpolar, always above the horizon. We decided to keep an insert in the January map showing the position of M42, the Great Nebula in the Sword of Orion, and for that reason, to stick with the set time of 9 p.m., (10 p.m. BST in summer), although in Scotland the sky isn’t dark then during June and July.
To use the maps in theory you should hold them overhead, aligning the North edge to true north, marked by Polaris and indicated by Dubhe and Merak, the Pointers. It’s more practical to hold the map in front of you when looking south and then rotate it as you face east, south and west. Some readers are confused because east is on the left, opposite to terrestrial maps, but that’s because they’re the other way up. When you’re facing south and looking at the sky, east is on your left.
The star patterns are the same for each month of each year, and only the positions of the planets change. (“Astronomy Handbook” accidentally shows Saturn in Virgo during May, showing that the maps weren’t originally drawn for the Hausman book.) Consequently regular readers for a year will by then have built up a complete set of twelve.
©DuncanLunan2013, updated monthly since then.