Sky events · August 2026

Total solar eclipse in Leo

17:45 UTC

On August 12, 2026 the Moon covers the Sun completely — a total solar eclipse at 20° Leo, peaking at 17:45 universal time. Along the narrow track where totality falls, day turns briefly to dusk; everywhere else, and in the astrology, it is the year's most emphatic new moon.

Peak, universal time
17:45 UTC
In the sign
Leo
The Moon stands at
20°02′ Leo
Sun or Moon covered
100% at most

A solar eclipse is a new moon with exact aim: the Moon always passes between Earth and Sun at a new moon, but only when the line-up crosses the Moon's orbital nodes does it actually block the light. The tradition has read these interruptions for millennia as markers — endings and beginnings compressed into a single afternoon. Modern astrologers keep the reading but soften the fatalism: an eclipse in Leo asks where your creative and personal authority is headed, and tends to answer the question faster than you would have.

Eclipses arrive in pairs. This one opens the season; the partial lunar eclipse at the Pisces full moon on August 28 closes it. The two weeks between them have a reputation for being eventful — a reputation worth neither fearing nor engineering. The practical advice the tradition gives is old and simple: watch what leaves, welcome what arrives, and avoid forcing major launches onto the exact day.

Questions to carry

  • What role have you outgrown that an outside event would mercifully end?
  • If the next six months rearranged themselves around one Leo theme — being seen, making something, leading — which would you want it to be?

Keep following

Behind this eventExact times, positions, sources, and method
Exact instant
2026-08-12T17:45:46.794Z
Ecliptic longitude
140.04° · 20°02′ Leo
Maximum obscuration
1.000
Fact source
eclipses.json, generated 2026-07-20

Instants and positions come from the site's astronomy engine and its committed yearly and monthly sky catalogs — the same data behind the Almanac and the daily horoscopes. Times are universal time; in the Americas an instant can fall the evening before the date printed. Sign-by-sign notes, where present, use whole-sign solar houses. The readings are a tradition being applied, not a forecast — the methodology page sets out both halves.