The Sky Above You, September 2026
by Duncan Lunan
After Full Moon on August 28th the Moon is New on September 11th and Full on September 26th, meanwhile passing Mars on the 7th, Jupiter on the 8th and 9th, Venus on the 14th, and Saturn on September 26th and 27th, rejoining the Pleiades on September 30th after first passing them on the 2nd and 3rd. On the morning of September 8th, the crescent moon occults the outer regions of the star cluster Praesepe, with Jupiter below. Jupiter lies above the crescent Moon the following night, when there may also be meteors from the boundary of Pisces and Aquarius. The shower comes from Comet 45P/Honda/Mrkos/Pajdusšáková, in 1927, and in Stargazing 2026 Nigel Henbest warns that the meteors may be ‘sporadic’, so don’t expect too much.
The planet Mercury is too close to the Sun to be visible from here.
Venus is still lower in the evening sky, right of the crescent Moon on September 14th, at its greatest brilliance when it disappears into twilight to the right of the Moon, around September 22nd.
Mars moves through Gemini, as bright as Castor and Pollux, below them and left of the Moon on September 7th.
Jupiter is brilliant in the morning sky, rising about 3 a.m. in Cancer, with the waning Moon above on the 8th and 9th.
Saturn in Pisces rises at 8 p.m., passed by the Moon on September 26th and 27th.
Uranus, in Taurus, rises at 9.30 p.m..
Neptune is at opposition in Pisces on the 25th, closest to us and visible all night with optical aid.
On September 23rd, nights become longer than days for the first time since the spring, with the Sun moving across the equator at the Autumnal equinox, towards its position at the winter solstice in December. There have been more cloudy nights than there were last year, with little chance (for example) to watch for the anticipated nova of Tau Corona Borealis, every 80 years or so. Still, keep looking!
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.