Eclipses in Your Chart

An eclipse lands in your chart when a solar or lunar eclipse falls in one of your natal houses and makes a close aspect to your planets or angles. The house shows the area of life it stirs. The aspect shows what it touches. The charge tends to run about six months, which is why an eclipse that catches your chart often reads as a turning point rather than a single day.

Not every eclipse reaches you. Four to seven eclipses happen across any two-year stretch, and most fall on degrees that sit quietly in your chart, far from anything. The ones that matter are close enough to your Sun, Moon, Ascendant, or another natal point to pull on it. This tool sorts that for you: it takes the eclipses active now and approaching, drops each into your houses, and measures how tightly it contacts your planets, so you see at a glance which eclipses are yours and which are just weather.

An eclipse marks a period worth your attention in a specific part of your life. It stays a pattern and an available reading rather than a verdict, and what you do inside that window is still yours.

You can do this by hand with an ephemeris and your birth chart, or let the tool above run it from your birth data. By hand, the method has four steps.

1. List the eclipses around now. Write down the solar and lunar eclipses for the current year and the next, with their dates, signs, and exact degrees. Any eclipse table gives you these, and so does the Saros cycle calculator.
2. Place each eclipse in a house. Find which natal house holds the eclipse degree. With whole-sign houses, the eclipse's sign is the house, so an eclipse in Leo lands in whichever house Leo rules for you.
3. Measure its aspects to your chart. Check the eclipse degree against each natal planet and angle for a conjunction, opposition, or square inside a 5 degree orb. A conjunction is the strongest contact. An eclipse with no aspect to anything personal passes lightly.
4. Note the type and the node. Record whether it is solar or lunar, and which lunar node it sits beside. Both shade the reading.

The slow part by hand is the third step, because measuring every eclipse against every natal point is the kind of repetitive arithmetic a chart engine does in a blink. The calculator runs all four steps for the active and upcoming eclipses at once, ranks them by how hard they hit your chart, and gives you the six-month window each one runs.

Astrologers split on how tight an eclipse orb should be, anywhere from one degree to five. Loose orbs catch more eclipses and dilute each one. Tight orbs catch fewer and mean more. This tool works two orbs, for two different questions.

For aspects, an eclipse counts as touching a natal planet or angle when it forms a conjunction, opposition, or square inside 5 degrees. Those three are the hard contacts, the ones predictive astrologers weight. Trines and sextiles from an eclipse are left out on purpose, since most practitioners read them as too mild to register against something as blunt as an eclipse. The conjunction carries the most force of the three.

For a direct hit, when an eclipse falls within 1.5 degrees of one of your natal points, the tool treats that degree as sensitized: the eclipse is sitting on your planet rather than merely aspecting it, and that is the strongest reading available. The 1.5 degree figure follows Bernadette Brady, who works eclipses tightly in Predictive Astrology: The Eagle and the Lark. A sensitized degree stays live for roughly six months, until the next eclipse season clears it.

The type of eclipse colors the whole reading. A solar eclipse is a New Moon close to a node, so it carries the New Moon's nature: a seed, something begun, often before you have words for it. A lunar eclipse is a Full Moon close to a node, so it carries the Full Moon's nature: a culmination, something brought to light, sometimes an ending that clears the ground. When an eclipse lands on your chart, ask first which of those two it is, because it sets whether the window opens a door or closes one.

The node matters too. Eclipses always come in seasons near the lunar nodes, and which node an eclipse sits beside shades its pull. Near the North Node, the charge tends to read as forward motion, toward something you are meant to take up. Near the South Node, it tends to read as release, toward something ready to be set down. If you want the nodal axis on its own terms, the North Node calculator and South Node calculator go further. An eclipse adds a dated, specific charge to whichever node it touches.

A fixed degree does nothing on its own, and an eclipse degree is no different until something activates it or until it activates one of yours. What gives eclipses their reputation is the window. When an eclipse falls on a sensitive point in your chart, practitioners read its influence across roughly six months, often building toward the eclipse and resolving in the weeks after. The tool gives you that window for each eclipse it finds, so you are reading a season rather than a date.

Eclipses also come in families. Every eclipse belongs to a Saros series that recurs about every eighteen years, and the eclipses of one series carry a related theme across a lifetime. That is part of why some eclipse seasons land harder on you than others: a series that touches your chart will keep touching it, season after season, until the matter is worked through. Bernadette Brady reads each named series for its signature, and the Saros cycle calculator names the family behind any eclipse so you can place the current one in a longer line.

Four eclipses fall in 2026. The February and March pair sit in Aquarius and Virgo; the August pair in Leo and Pisces.

• February 17, 2026: an annular solar eclipse at 28°50′ Aquarius, a late-degree eclipse close enough to the anaretic 29th degree to read with that final-degree pressure.
• March 3, 2026: a total lunar eclipse at 12°54′ Virgo.
• August 12, 2026: a total solar eclipse at 20°02′ Leo.
• August 28, 2026: a partial lunar eclipse at 4°54′ Pisces.

Whether any of these reaches you depends on your chart, not your Sun sign. An eclipse at 20° Leo is a major event for someone with a planet near 20° of a fixed sign and a quiet sky for everyone else. Enter your birth data above and the tool places each 2026 eclipse in your houses and measures it against your planets, so you see which of the four are yours and which pass by. The degrees here are the published figures; the calculator reads them from the eclipse catalog for your exact chart.

These two tools answer different questions, and it helps to set them side by side. This page reads the eclipses moving through your chart now and ahead, the live and approaching ones. The prenatal eclipse calculator reads the single eclipse that fell just before you were born, a fixed point you carry for life.

The two meet when a transiting eclipse lands on your prenatal eclipse degree, which tends to read as an especially loaded season. If you want the nearest lunation before birth rather than the nearest eclipse, the prenatal syzygy calculator handles that point, since most New and Full Moons are not eclipses.

The orbs and the six-month window follow Bernadette Brady, Predictive Astrology: The Eagle and the Lark, who works eclipses to a tight degree and reads them across a season. The tool weights conjunctions, oppositions, and squares to the natal chart and leaves the soft aspects out, in line with predictive practice. The solar and lunar readings follow the lunation each eclipse is built on.

Your natal positions come from the Augurine chart engine, built on the ANISE and NASA JPL ephemeris stack, and the eclipse dates and degrees come from its eclipse catalog, the same catalog behind the Saros cycle calculator. Both are referred to the same of-date frame, so the contacts between them line up with your full chart. House placement uses whole-sign houses by default, the hard aspects read at a 5 degree orb, and a 1.5 degree conjunction marks a direct hit.

An eclipse on your chart marks a season worth your attention in a named part of your life. It offers a pattern and an available reading rather than a prediction or a verdict. Read the house, weigh the aspect, note the type and the node, then judge the window against the rest of your chart. Once your birth data is saved, Augurine's timing engine tracks these activations for you, so an eclipse that lands on your chart comes back to you when it is live, and your forecast places it in the months around it.