The dates of the next eclipses

Eclipses happen in seasons, and there are two a year. Each season brings two or three eclipses in about a month, and then the sky goes five months with none. The times below are Brasília time and come from the same ephemeris this site uses to build charts.

Look at the third column. In 2026 and 2027 the eclipses fall in Aquarius and Leo, in Virgo and Pisces; by 2028 it is Cancer and Capricorn. That is not chance, and the next section explains what decides it — it is the same thing that decides WHY they come round every six months.

Why there are eclipses only twice a year

A New Moon happens every month, and so does a Full Moon. If that were enough, there would be twelve eclipses a year of each kind. What is missing is height.

The Moon's orbit is tilted by about five degrees against the Sun's path. At most New Moons the Moon passes above or below the Sun as seen from the Earth, and its shadow touches nothing. There is an eclipse only when the lunation happens near one of the two points where the two orbits cross — the lunar nodes, the same ones from South Node in the chart.

Measured across the 433 eclipses between 1930 and 2025: the Moon was never more than 1.55 degrees of height away at a solar eclipse, nor more than 1.57 at a lunar one. Its limit is a little over five degrees — which means every eclipse happens inside a narrow band around the nodes, and that is why they cluster into seasons.

The Earth passes through that region twice a year, and the gap between one season and the next is 173.4 days — measured across the 202 seasons of those 96 years, with the shortest at 162.5 and the longest at 184.3. Two seasons add up to 347 days, and the year has 365: that is why the dates move about nineteen days backwards each year, and it is why eclipses stay in the same pair of signs for years before moving on.

An eclipse is not a once-a-decade event

There were 433 eclipses between 1930 and 2025 — an average of 4.51 a year. Sixty-two of those 96 years had exactly four; twenty-two had five; nine had six; and only three years reached seven.

That changes what the word can explain. Something that happens four or five times a year is not the explanation for a hard year, and anyone saying “the eclipse shook everything up” is talking about something that happens every eleven weeks on average.

What almost never happens is something else: a TOTAL solar eclipse passing exactly over your own city. The band in which totality is visible is a few hundred kilometres wide, and it almost always falls over the sea or over land with nobody on it. There were 69 total solar eclipses in 96 years across the whole planet — how many of them passed over your own back yard is another number, and a far smaller one.

The six kinds, and what changes between them

There are three on each side, and the difference is geometry — not symbolic intensity. The count below comes from the same 433:

• Total solar (69 in 96 years). The Moon covers the Sun's disc completely. It is the only one in which the sky goes dark in daytime, and only inside the narrow band of the shadow.
• Annular solar (67). The Moon is farther from the Earth and does not cover everything: a ring of Sun is left around it. Same geometry, different distance.
• Partial solar (78). The shadow grazes past and the Moon bites a piece out of the Sun. It is the most common of the three.
• Total lunar (82). The Moon goes fully into the Earth's shadow and turns reddish. Totality lasted between 13 and 107 minutes across the 90 times it happened between 1930 and 2035, averaging 71 minutes.
• Partial lunar (59). Only part of the Moon goes into the shadow — you can see the dark curve biting into the disc.
• Penumbral lunar (78). The Moon passes through the edge of the shadow and only dims a shade. Plenty of people look and see no difference at all, and it counts anyway.

In astrology, what usually weighs is not the kind: it is where it falls. A penumbral on the degree of your Sun says more about your year than a total one on the far side of your chart.

The tradition: the Chaldean Saros

Predicting eclipses is one of the oldest things astronomy knows how to do, and it began as astrology. The astronomers of Babylon worked out, before the sixth century BC, that eclipses repeat every 6,585 days and a third — 18 years, 11 days and 8 hours. It is the cycle now called the Saros, and Ptolemy already records it in the Almagest.

The third of a day is the interesting part: since it does not close a whole number of days, the next eclipse of the same family happens with the Earth turned a third of the way round — that is, over another part of the planet. It takes three Saros cycles, 54 years, for an eclipse to come back to roughly the same region.

In the tradition, the eclipse was always read as a mark of time: not the cause of what happens, but the stamp on a period. It is a soberer reading than the internet's, and it is the one this site uses.

Where the eclipse falls in YOUR chart

The sky is the same for eight billion people, and the chart is not. The eclipse happens at a degree — 28 degrees of Aquarius, say. What it means for you is what you have at that degree: a house, a planet, a point of your chart, or nothing.

This is the opposite of what the eclipse horoscope usually does, which is to say the same thing to everyone with the same Sun sign. Two Aquarians with different Ascendants have that degree in different houses — in one it is the money house, in the other the work house — and the same eclipsed New Moon marks matters that look nothing alike.

The three questions that make the difference, and all three depend on calculation:

• Which house of your chart that degree falls in. It depends on the hour and the city of birth — the subject has a page in what an astrological house is.
• Whether it touches a planet of yours. An eclipse a few degrees from your Sun, your Moon or your Ascendant is another matter — and “a few degrees” is a calculation, not an impression.
• Which pair of signs the season is in. It is the same pair of nodes as that period, and it stays there for a year and a half: the subject comes back, it does not pass.

And the Moon's phase for each day, with the calculation done, is on the this site's lunar tab — including when the Moon is eclipsed.

What the calculation shows and the magazine table does not

Three things, and all three come out of the same 96-year sweep:

• A season has two or three eclipses, and almost always two. There were 173 seasons with two and 29 with three, across the 202 measured. When there are three, the middle one is usually the penumbral nobody notices.
• The date moves backwards, not forwards. Nineteen days a year — the opposite of what happens with the retrograde of Saturn, which slips forward. Anyone who remembers “the eclipse is always in August” will be wrong within five years.
• A lunar eclipse always happens at the Full Moon and a solar one always at the New Moon, without exception across all 433. It is not a coincidence: it is the definition. The phases are in the phases of the Moon.

Frequently asked questions about eclipses