Sky events · August 2026

New moon in Leo

17:36 UTC

The Leo new moon of August 12 is not an ordinary monthly reset — it is a total solar eclipse, the Moon crossing the Sun's face at 20° Leo. The tradition treats an eclipsed new moon as a beginning with unusual reach: less a fresh page, more a new chapter heading.

Exact, universal time
17:36 UTC
In the sign
Leo
The Moon stands at
20°01′ Leo

Ordinary new moons are for quiet starts; astrologers tend to read eclipse new moons as doors that open on their own schedule. At 20° Leo the register is creative and personal — authorship, romance, performance, the parts of life where you are most yourself in public. Whatever begins near this date, the tradition suggests holding plans loosely: eclipse beginnings often look different a season later.

This is also the middle of an eclipse pair. A partial lunar eclipse follows at the Pisces full moon on August 28, closing the season two weeks later. Reading the two dates as one story — a Leo opening, a Pisces release — is the older way to work with them.

Questions to carry

  • If a door opened for you this week without your pushing on it, what would you want to be true about how you walk through it?
  • What Leo-flavored thing — creative, romantic, personal — have you been postponing for a more sensible season?

Keep following

Behind this eventExact times, positions, sources, and method
Exact instant
2026-08-12T17:36:35.369Z
Ecliptic longitude
140.03° · 20°01′ Leo
Fact source
transits-2026-08.json

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.