Night sky highlights - August 2026

This month brings a spectacular partial solar eclipse, a partial lunar eclipse, six planets lined up across the pre-dawn sky, and the year's best meteor shower.

Top 3 things to see in the night sky in August 2026

• 12 August – witness the best partial solar eclipse Britain has seen since 1999
• 12- 13 August – catch the Perseids at their peak, under almost perfectly dark skies
• 28 August – watch the Moon turn red during a partial lunar eclipse 

Chasing the shadow

On Wednesday 12 August the Moon and Sun will line up for the best solar eclipse Britain has seen in almost thirty years. From London around 90% of the Sun will be covered, rising to roughly 95% in Cornwall and as much as 97% at the south-western tip of Ireland. It's the closest the UK has come to totality since 1999, and we won't see another this good until 2081.

From London, first contact (the moment the Moon first touches the Sun's edge) falls at 6.17pm. The eclipse reaches its maximum, around 90% coverage, at 7.12pm, before the Moon slides off again and the eclipse ends at 8.06pm. Because this is happening as the Sun sets, and will therefore be low on the horizon, you'll need a high point with a clear view of the western horizon.

If you can't get somewhere with a clear view, the Royal Observatory will be hosting a free live stream of the eclipse on the day.

However you watch, never look directly at the Sun. Use certified eclipse glasses in good condition only (look for the ISO 12312-2 safety mark and check the manufacturer details). Sunglasses, however dark, are not safe.

At the eclipse's maximum, the sky may darken enough for Jupiter and Mercury to be visible to the west of the eclipsed Sun, with Venus visible further south. It's also worth watching how animals around you react; dogs, birds and even insects sometimes behave as though dusk has arrived early, and apps like iNaturalist are a nice way to log what you notice.

Learn more about this eclipse

Ancient observers would have reacted rather differently to an eclipse than we do today. In ancient China, a solar eclipse meant a dragon was devouring the Sun, and people banged drums to scare it off, which after a few minutes worked a treat. The Inca read eclipses as a sign of the sun god's displeasure. Most strikingly, a solar eclipse in 585 BC is said to have stopped a war near the Halys River, in modern Turkey, mid-battle; the armies laid down their weapons the moment daylight failed and negotiated peace soon after. According to Herodotus, writing well over a century later, the eclipse had even been predicted in advance by Thales of Miletus, possibly the earliest recorded eclipse prediction in history, though exactly how he managed it is still debated. 

The astronomers who weighed starlight

Eclipses have settled scientific arguments too. In 1917, Frank Dyson, the Astronomer Royal at Greenwich, organised an expedition to test a prediction of Einstein's newly published general theory of relativity: that the Sun's gravity should visibly bend the light of stars passing close to it. Two teams travelled to the 1919 total eclipse; Andrew Crommelin and Charles Davidson to Sobral in Brazil, Arthur Eddington and Edwin Cottingham to the island of Príncipe off West Africa, and photographed the eclipsed Sun on glass plates, comparing the star positions to the same patch of sky photographed months later without the Sun in the way.

The starlight had shifted by almost exactly the amount Einstein predicted. It made him famous overnight, and it's the same basic principle astronomers now use for gravitational lensing, where the gravity of entire galaxies bends and magnifies the light of objects far beyond them.

A blood moon before dawn

Solar and lunar eclipses travel in pairs, roughly two weeks apart, and this year is no exception. On 28 August, a partial lunar eclipse will be visible from the UK, beginning at 3.33am BST as the Moon starts to slip into Earth's shadow. It reaches maximum at 5.12am, when about 90% of the Moon sits inside Earth's umbra - the darkest part of its shadow.

The Moon will be low in the sky throughout, so you'll want a clear view towards the western horizon. At maximum, expect a reddish tinge: sunlight filtering through Earth's atmosphere is bent towards the Moon, with the bluer wavelengths scattered away and the reds and oranges left behind. This is the same reason lunar eclipses are nicknamed 'blood moons'. 

A hundred wishes an hour

If there's one date to circle this month, it's 12 August. Overnight 12-13 August is the peak of the Perseids, the most reliable meteor shower of the year, arriving this time under an almost perfectly dark, new-moon sky.

The Perseids are debris shed by comet 109P/Swift-Tuttle, which swings through the inner Solar System once every 133 years. It last passed in 1992 and won't return until 2126. Every August, Earth ploughs through the trail it left behind, and the resulting meteors hit our atmosphere at around 36 miles a second - some at 130,000mph, like driving a windscreen straight into rain.

At their best, the Perseids can produce over 100 meteors an hour, though real-world rates are usually lower. The radiant sits in Perseus, just below the 'W' of Cassiopeia, and climbs higher as the night goes on, so the richest viewing is generally from around 1am until dawn. Find the darkest spot you can (a light pollution map helps with planning), give your eyes 15 minutes to adjust, and simply look up.

Occasionally a meteor is bright and large enough to explode as it breaks apart under the intense temperature. These are called bolides, from the Greek 'bolis', meaning a missile. The same physics - a shockwave compressing and heating the material ahead of it - turns up elsewhere in astronomy too, from the bow shocks carved into nebulae by fast-moving stars to the shockwaves driven outward by supernovae. 

The galaxy overhead

Away from the meteors, August is also prime time to look south after sunset and take in the Milky Way itself, arching from horizon to horizon. Look for the Great Rift - a dark seam that appears to split the galaxy's bright band in two, running from Cygnus in the north down through Aquila and Sagittarius towards the horizon. It isn't really a gap, it's a foreground of dust clouds, hundreds of light-years closer to us than the glowing core they're obscuring. 

Six worlds before dawn

On 12 August, six planets will stretch across the pre-dawn sky at once. In order from east to west: Jupiter, Mercury, Mars, Uranus, Saturn and Neptune.

From London, the whole line-up is best seen in a narrow window from about 4.54am to 5.03am (sunrise follows at around 5.41am). Mars and Saturn are the easiest to pick out with the naked eye; Mercury and Jupiter are possible but tricky, low in the brightening twilight; Uranus and Neptune will need binoculars or a telescope. All six sit roughly along a single arc across the sky. 

Southern Hemisphere: a comet on its best behaviour since 1967

For readers south of the equator, this August belongs to a comet. 10P/Tempel, a Jupiter-family comet on a roughly 5.3-year orbit, reaches perihelion on 2 August and makes its closest approach to Earth the very next day. It will pass within about 62 million kilometres, its most favourable appearance since 1967.

Through early August it crosses from Capricornus into Piscis Austrinus, brightening to around magnitude 7-8, within reach of binoculars or a small telescope, though not a naked-eye object. From the UK it barely clears the southern horizon and is a real challenge to spot. However, from further south it climbs almost overhead around local midnight, making this much easier to catch below the equator. Expect it to fade gradually as August goes on. 

The Moon's phases in August 2026

• Last quarter – 6 August  
• New Moon – 12 August  
• First quarter – 20 August  
• Full Moon – 28 August 

Stargazing tips

When looking at faint objects such as stars, nebulae, the Milky Way and other galaxies, it is important to allow your eyes to adapt to the dark so that you can achieve better night vision.

Allow 15 minutes for your eyes to become sensitive in the dark, and remember not to look at your mobile phone or any other bright device when stargazing.

If you're using a stargazing app on your phone, switch on the red night vision mode.

Header image: The globular star cluster M62. Image credit: NASA, ESA, and S. Anderson (University of Washington) and J. Chaname (Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile)