Your Wellbeing Horoscopes: Sky Map for the Week Starting 24 August 2026

The Moon opens the week already swollen and bright, a waxing gibbous climbing higher each night as it heads toward the one date this entire sky map has been building to. On Monday, the last trailing meteors of the Perseids burn out quietly, the shower's month long run officially closing exactly as your week begins. Do not mourn it. What comes at the end of this week outshines it by a wide margin.

By Thursday night the Moon is nearly full, sitting close enough to complete that the difference is barely visible to the eye. Then, on the night of 27 August into the small hours of 28 August, it happens. The Full Sturgeon Moon, named for the giant freshwater fish once caught in greatest numbers under its light, slides into the deepest part of Earth's shadow and all but disappears. This is a deep partial lunar eclipse, and a dramatic one: at greatest eclipse, around 05:12 in the morning UK time, roughly 96 per cent of the lunar disc sits inside the umbra, Earth's darkest shadow. Only a slim bright rim remains uncovered. For anyone watching, the effect will look remarkably close to a full total eclipse, the shadowed face of the Moon deepening to a rusty copper red as sunlight bends around the edge of our planet and paints it there. The partial phase alone runs for well over three hours, so there is no need to set an alarm for one precise minute. In the UK the eclipse will be happening low in the western sky in the hour before dawn, which means your best view depends entirely on finding a clear run of sky down to the horizon rather than the tallest building in your way.

The Moon spends this eclipse in the constellation Aquarius, the Water Bearer, close to the faint stars of its Water Jar and not far from the bright southern star Fomalhaut. Astrologically, though, the Full Moon falls in tropical Pisces, directly opposite the Sun, which has just settled into Virgo for the season. That opposition is the real story of the week. Virgo asks you to sort, refine and put things in working order. Pisces dissolves edges, blurs categories and asks you to feel your way through instead. A full moon always brings something to a head. An eclipse accelerates it, often faster and further than you planned for. Whatever has been quietly straining between the practical version of your life and the emotional truth of it will not stay quiet much longer.