The Sky Above You, June 2026
by Duncan Lunan
The Moon is Full on June 30th, meanwhile passing near Saturn in the morning sky on the 10th, and Mars on the 13th. It's New on the 15th, near Mercury and Jupiter on the 16th, very near Venus in early evening of the 17th, passing Regulus in Leo on the 19th, and is at First Quarter (i.e. half full) on the night of the Summer Solstice, June 21st. After passing Spica in Virgo on the 23rd and Antares in Scorpius on the 27th, the Moon is Full on the morning of the 30th as above.
Artemis 2, the first crewed mission to the Moon since 1972, was launched on April 1st, when I had just been admitted to hospital with a blood clot after waiting nearly 54 years for the mission. The spacecraft entered a 'free-return' trajectory, taking 10 days to go round the Moon and return to Earth - a complete success. The third mission next year will rehearse rendezvous techniques in Earth orbit, with the landing no sooner than 2028. But that mission has already been postponed from spring next year to autumn; the new configuration of the SpaceX booster and orbiter was flight-tested on May 22nd and although the main mission succeeded, both have now been grounded pending investigation of problems in flight; while the alternative Blue Origin vehicle has just been grounded following a catastrophic explosion of a less powerful booster during preflight testing. China is not scheduled to attempt a crewed Moon landing before 2030, but with the gap narrowing, their planners must be looking at earlier options.
The planet Mercury remains low in the evening sky, though setting about 11 p.m., with Venus and Jupiter above it to the left in early June, and at greatest elongation from the Sun on the 15th, with the crescent Moon above, the following night, before it disappears mid-June.
Venus is brilliant in the evening sky, passing Jupiter within 1.5 degrees on June 9th, passed by the crescent Moon on the 17th, and near Praesepe in Cancer on the 19th. In the western USA Venus will be occulted by the Moon on the 17th.
Mars reappears in late June in Taurus, still faint in the morning sky after a long absence behind the Sun, to the right of the waning Moon on the 13th, and passing below the Pleiades on the 29th.
Jupiter is still brilliant in Gemini, near Venus as above, to lower left of Castor and Pollux, setting around 11 p.m., and passed by the Moon on the 16th.
Saturn in Pisces returns to the morning sky, to lower right of the crescent Moon on June 10th, and rising around 2 a.m. by the end of the month.
Uranus, in Taurus, is invisible beyond the Sun for most of June, but visible in the same binocular field as Mars in the last week of June.
Neptune, in Pisces, is to the right of Saturn, rising about 1.30 a.m., passed by the Moon on the 9th.
There are no meteor showers expected in darkness during June.
Duncan Lunan’s recent books are available from booksellers and through Amazon; details are on Duncan’s website, www.duncanlunan.com.
The Sky Above You
By Duncan Lunan
About this Column
I began writing this column in early 1983 at the suggestion of the late Chris Boyce. At that time the Post Office would allow 1000 free mailings to start a new business, just under the number of small press newspapers in the UK at the time. I printed a flyer with the help of John Braithwaite (of Braithwaite Telescopes) offering a three-part column for £5, with the sky this month, a series of articles for beginners, and a monthly news feature. The column ran from May 1983 to May 1993 in various newspapers and magazines, but never in more than five outlets at a time, although every one of those 1000-plus papers would have included an astrology column. Since then it’s appeared sporadically in a range of publications including The Southsider in Glasgow and the Dalyan Courier in Turkey, but most often, normally three times per year, in Jeff Hawke’s Cosmos from the first issue in March 2003 until the last in January 2018, with a last piece in “Jeff Hawke, The Epilogue” (Jeff Hawke Club, 2020). It continues to appear monthly in Troon's Going Out and Orkney News, with an expanded version broadcast monthly on Arransound Radio since August 2023
The monthly maps for the column were drawn for me by Jim Barker, based on similar, uncredited ones in Dr. Leon Hausman’s “Astronomy Handbook” (Fawcett Publications, 1956). Jim had to redraw or elongate several of them because they were drawn for mid-US latitudes, about 40 degrees North, making them usable over most of the northern hemisphere. The biggest change needed was in November when only Dubhe, Merak and Megrez of the Big Dipper, as the US version called it, were visible at that latitude. In the UK, all the stars of the Plough are circumpolar, always above the horizon. We decided to keep an insert in the January map showing the position of M42, the Great Nebula in the Sword of Orion, and for that reason, to stick with the set time of 9 p.m., (10 p.m. BST in summer), although in Scotland the sky isn’t dark then during June and July.
To use the maps in theory you should hold them overhead, aligning the North edge to true north, marked by Polaris and indicated by Dubhe and Merak, the Pointers. It’s more practical to hold the map in front of you when looking south and then rotate it as you face east, south and west. Some readers are confused because east is on the left, opposite to terrestrial maps, but that’s because they’re the other way up. When you’re facing south and looking at the sky, east is on your left.
The star patterns are the same for each month of each year, and only the positions of the planets change. (“Astronomy Handbook” accidentally shows Saturn in Virgo during May, showing that the maps weren’t originally drawn for the Hausman book.) Consequently regular readers for a year will by then have built up a complete set of twelve.
©DuncanLunan2013, updated monthly since then.