The Sky Above You, October 2026
by Duncan Lunan
The Moon is New on October 10th and Full on October 26th, meanwhile passing close above Mars on the morning of the 5th, Jupiter on the 6th, and Regulus in Leo on the 7th, going on to pass Saturn on October 23rd and 24th, and occulting the upper Pleiades on the night of October 27th-28th, 2-3 nights after the end of British Summer Time on the 25th.
The planet Mercury is too close to the Sun to be visible from here, though at its greatest distance from the Sun on October 12th.
Venus is also invisible from this latitude this month, at inferior conjunction with the Sun on the 24th.
Mars moves through Cancer, rising at 00.30 a.m.. The Moon passes close above Mars on the morning of the 5th, occulting it as seen from NW Canada and China, and Mars is directly in front of the star cluster Praesepe, ‘the Beehive’, on the mornings of the 11th and 12th, overtaking Jupiter as the month goes on (see below).
Jupiter in Cancer reappears in the morning sky, rising around 4.30 a.m., below the waning crescent Moon on the 6th. At the end of the month Jupiter is below Mars and above Regulus, in the morning sky, and at 10.18 a.m. on the 6th, Jupiter will be occulted by the Moon, in daylight from here but well seen from the United States. By the end of October, Jupiter will be in the same binocular field as Mars. As Jupiter nears its equinox in December, its four major moons will take part in an increasingly complex series of eclipses and occultations, detailed in the October issue of Astronomy Now and after.
Saturn in Pisces is at opposition, its nearest to Earth, on October 4th, visible all night long, passed by the Moon on October 23rd and 24th. The current issue of Astronomy Now points out that the rings will temporarily be brighter than usual and as bright as the planet’s disc, for a few days around opposition, due to a reflection process called ‘the Seeliger effect’.
Uranus, in Taurus, rises at 7.30 p.m., 5 degrees south of the Moon on October 1st and 28th, approaching opposition with the Sun next month.
Neptune in Pisces sets at 5.30 a.m..
On the night of October 21st-22nd, the Earth makes its annual crossing of one of the meteor streams from Halley’s Comet, coming from Orion with best visibility in the morning after Moonset. As the comet passed its furthest distance from the Sun in 2023, and won’t be back until 2060-61, very little is expected this time – but you never know when you might catch a stray meteor from it, during the crucial dates.
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.