The Sky Above You, July 2026
by Duncan Lunan
After Full Moon on June 30th, the Moon is next New on July 14th and Full on July 29th. Meanwhile it passes Saturn on the 7th and 8th, Mars and the Pleiades on the 11th, still near Mars on the 12th, and after New Moon it is near Venus and Regulus on the 17th, before passing Jupiter on the 22nd. The waning Moon passes below Antares in Scorpius on the 24th.
The planet Mercury is not visible from here in July, though further south it will reappear in the morning sky later in the month.
Venus remains brilliant in the evening sky, passing less than a degree above Regulus in Taurus on the 9th, setting at 11 p.m. high above Jupiter to the left in early July and passed by the Moon on the 17th.
The Earth is at aphelion, furthest from the Sun, on July 6th.
Mars remains in Taurus, but during July it moves from near the Pleiades, past Uranus at 0.1 of a degree on July 4th, past Aldebaran on the 13th, and by the end of the month it is between the horns of the Bull, about to leave the constellation.
Jupiter in Cancer now sets below and right of Venus, as above, setting around 10.30 p.m., 8 p.m. by mid-month, and disappears as the month goes on.
Saturn in Pisces rises just after midnight, passed by the Moon on July 7th and 8th.
Uranus, in Taurus, rises at 1.30 a.m. and is passed by much brighter Mars at only 9 arcminutes on the 4th. To quote Nigel Henbest in Stargazing 2026, "It's your opportunity to view the reddest and the greenest planets of the Solar System in the same binocular or telescope field of view".
Neptune lies 10 degrees to the right of Saturn in Pisces, rising half an hour before it.
The delta Aquarid meteor shower peaks on the 28th to 29th, and the Alpha Capricornid meteors on the 30th, but as they're a day before and after Full Moon not much is to be expected.
Duncan Lunan’s recent books are available from booksellers; 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.