🔭 Astronomical Events
October 12–18, 2026
Written by Mia Astrology ✨🌌
This is one of those October weeks when the sky starts feeling properly alive again, because the Moon is young and beautifully unobtrusive at the beginning of the week, the evenings are genuinely dark, Saturn is sitting there practically begging anyone with access to a telescope to come and look at it, the Orionid meteor shower is gathering momentum ahead of next week’s peak, and the autumn sky has now reached the point where Andromeda, Perseus, Cassiopeia and the Double Cluster are no longer supporting characters waiting for summer to leave the stage.
They have taken over.
And I love this particular point in October because you do not need one enormous headline event to make the week worthwhile; instead, you get several nights when you can walk outside at a perfectly reasonable hour, allow your eyes to adjust and actually explore the sky rather than standing around waiting for one specific thing to happen at 3:17 in the morning.
The Moon begins the week as a young waxing crescent following the New Moon, which means the early evenings remain wonderfully dark, while by the weekend it has grown enough to become a genuinely interesting binocular and telescope target without yet turning the entire sky into a floodlit car park.
Meanwhile, the Orionids are building, and because these meteors are fragments of Halley’s Comet, every streak you happen to catch this week comes with a rather wonderful backstory.
The comet itself will not return until 2061.
Its leftovers, apparently, refuse to wait.
🌒 THE MOON RETURNS TO THE EVENING SKY
October 12–14
The week begins with a delicate waxing crescent Moon appearing low in the western sky after sunset.
This is one of my favourite lunar stages to photograph because the Moon looks almost impossibly thin against twilight, particularly when Earthshine illuminates the otherwise dark portion of the lunar disc.
Earthshine is exactly what it sounds like.
Sunlight hits Earth.
Earth reflects some of that sunlight toward the Moon.
The lunar night side reflects a tiny fraction of it back toward us.
So when you see the dark portion of a crescent Moon faintly glowing, you are looking at sunlight that has travelled from the Sun to Earth, from Earth to the Moon and then from the Moon back to your eyes.
Which is an unnecessarily complicated journey for a little bit of light, but the result is beautiful.
Binoculars make Earthshine particularly lovely.