Lunar Eclipse August 28, 2026: Times, Degree, All 12 Signs

The partial lunar eclipse of August 28, 2026 reaches maximum at 04:12:58 UT, with the Moon at 4 degrees 51 minutes of Pisces and the Sun opposite it at 4 degrees 54 minutes of Virgo. Umbral magnitude is 0.93, which puts it a fraction short of total. Every figure here is computed rather than recalled.

The numbers

Date	August 28, 2026
Maximum eclipse	04:12:58 UT
Moon	4°51’ Pisces
Sun	4°54’ Virgo
Type	Partial (umbral)
Umbral magnitude	0.9299
Penumbral magnitude	1.9646
Saros series	138 (member 29)

The four contact times

A lunar eclipse is not a moment. It is a slow pass through two shadows, and the useful times are the boundaries.

Stage	UT	Eastern	Pacific
Penumbral shadow first touches	01:23:58	9:24 PM (Aug 27)	6:24 PM (Aug 27)
Umbral phase begins	02:33:53	10:34 PM (Aug 27)	7:34 PM (Aug 27)
Maximum	04:12:58	12:13 AM (Aug 28)	9:13 PM (Aug 27)
Umbral phase ends	05:52:03	1:52 AM (Aug 28)	10:52 PM (Aug 27)
Penumbral shadow leaves	07:01:50	3:02 AM (Aug 28)	12:02 AM (Aug 28)

The two umbral times are the ones to write down. Subtract them and you get 3 hours 18 minutes 10 seconds of visibly eclipsed Moon. The penumbral stages either side are real but faint, and most people looking up during one see an ordinary full moon.

At maximum the Moon stands directly overhead near 63 degrees west, 9 degrees south, which is over Brazil. Anywhere the Moon is above the horizon at those times sees it: the Americas across the night of the 27th into the 28th, the Atlantic, and western Europe and Africa toward moonset.

Partial, by 7 percent

Umbral magnitude 0.9299 is a measurement, not a grade. It means 93 percent of the Moon’s diameter crosses into the umbra, Earth’s dark inner shadow, at the deepest point. The remaining sliver stays in the penumbra, lit by part of the Sun’s disc.

Had that number reached 1.0, this would be a total lunar eclipse and the whole disc would turn the familiar rust red. Instead a bright edge survives the whole way through, and the eclipsed portion takes on the colour without the Moon fully disappearing into it.

The axis, not the point

A solar eclipse happens where the Sun and Moon meet, so it lands on one degree. A lunar eclipse happens when they stand opposite each other, so it always lands on two.

Here the Moon sits at 4°51’ Pisces and the Sun at 4°54’ Virgo, three arcminutes off exact opposition. In chart terms that is one continuous line drawn across the wheel, and both ends are live. Virgo is the sign of the work, the routine, the practical fix; Pisces is the sign of what the work is for. Astrologers read the Virgo-Pisces axis as the tension between the two, and an eclipse on it puts both ends under the same light on the same night.

Which is why the sign readings further down come in pairs. Naming only the Pisces house would describe half the event.

The second half of one eclipse season

This eclipse is not a standalone. Eclipses arrive in pairs roughly two weeks apart, and this one closes the window that the total solar eclipse of August 12 opened at 20 degrees of Leo.

The pairing has a plain mechanical cause. Eclipses need the Sun near one of the two points where the Moon’s orbit crosses Earth’s orbital plane, and the Sun takes about five weeks to pass through that zone. A new moon at one end and a full moon at the other both qualify, so they come as a set.

The practical version: treat August 12 to August 28 as a single stretch rather than two dates. Whatever the Leo eclipse started tends to show its actual shape by the time the Pisces one arrives.

Saros 138, member 29

Every eclipse belongs to a family called a Saros series, and members of a series repeat every 18 years and 11 days as the same geometry comes back around. This one is the 29th member of Saros 138.

Run the clock backward by one step and you land in mid-August 2008; forward one step and you reach September 2044. Series members drift a little later and a little deeper each time, which is why an eclipse family produces partials for centuries before it produces totals, then partials again on the way out.

Who feels it most

The eclipse falls at roughly 5 degrees of the Pisces-Virgo axis. Three checks against your own chart, in order of how directly they land:

• 0 to 10 degrees of Pisces or Virgo. A planet, the Moon, or your Ascendant in that band takes the eclipse directly. This is the group that experiences a collective event as a personal one.
• 0 to 10 degrees of Gemini or Sagittarius. These catch the square, the 90 degree angle, which tends to read as friction between what the eclipse raises and something else already running.
• Everyone else. The eclipse still lands in a house pair, and the houses are the story.

You need your birth chart to run any of these, and the house version needs a birth time, because houses are set by the minute and the place rather than the date.

In MysticAlmanac, your chart is cast from your exact birth details with every placement given to the degree, so checking both ends of an axis takes seconds rather than an evening with a printout.

All twelve signs

Read from your rising sign if you know it, otherwise your Sun. The first house named holds the Moon in Pisces; the second holds the Sun in Virgo.

Aries: the 12th and 6th houses

Rest and routine. Something you have been carrying quietly meets the practical schedule that keeps it going. Endings surface here before they get announced anywhere else.

Taurus: the 11th and 5th houses

Friends, groups and audience on one end, creative work and romance on the other. A circle and a personal project pull against each other, and one of them resolves.

Gemini: the 10th and 4th houses

Career and home, the vertical axis of the chart. Public role against private base. This pairing rarely resolves by ignoring one side.

Cancer: the 9th and 3rd houses

The far horizon against the daily circuit: study, travel and belief on one end, local conversation and short trips on the other. A big idea gets tested against what your week can hold.

Leo: the 8th and 2nd houses

Shared resources against your own. Debts, taxes, a partner’s income, and what you earn independently of all of it. Fine print tends to surface on this axis.

Virgo: the 7th and 1st houses

The eclipse runs straight through you and the person across the table. Partnership against selfhood, with the Sun on your side of the line. Balance questions get answered rather than deferred.

Libra: the 6th and 12th houses

Work, health and the systems of an ordinary day, against rest and what runs underneath. Your body tends to make this argument for you if the schedule will not.

Scorpio: the 5th and 11th houses

What you make for yourself against what the group wants from you. Creative output meets audience, and the eclipse asks which one is setting the agenda.

Sagittarius: the 4th and 10th houses

Home against career, read from the other direction than Gemini’s. Foundations and reputation both come up, and moves in one usually cost something in the other.

Capricorn: the 3rd and 9th houses

The message against the meaning. What you say daily, and what you believe underneath it. Writing, teaching and travel all sit on this line.

Aquarius: the 2nd and 8th houses

Your own money against everyone else’s. Income, worth and pricing on one end; joint accounts, debts and inheritances on the other.

Pisces: the 1st and 7th houses

The eclipse lands in your own sign, on the axis of who you are and who you are with. Identity questions rarely stay theoretical under a lunar eclipse in the first house.

What a lunar eclipse does that a solar one does not

A solar eclipse is a new moon with the volume up, and new moons read as beginnings. A lunar eclipse is a full moon with the volume up, and full moons read as culminations. Something that has been building becomes visible, and visibility is what forces the decision.

That is the difference in practice between the two dates this month. August 12 opened a subject. August 28 shows you what it has grown into, which is why the pair works better read together than apart.

None of this is a forecast of events. An eclipse marks a degree, and the degree marks a house, and the house is a part of your life you can go and look at. What you find there is yours.