Every event worth watching, all year.
Eclipses, meteor showers, planetary oppositions, lunar missions, and rocket launches. The full 2026 sky-and-space calendar, curated for the curious.
The headliners of 2026
Totality sweeps Greenland, Iceland and northern Spain; a partial eclipse covers much of western Europe and northeastern North America. The first total solar eclipse to touch mainland Europe since 1999, and the start of a three-year golden age of eclipses.
The year's most beloved meteor shower peaks in near-perfect darkness. Up to ~100 meteors per hour.
The strongest shower of the year. ~120–150 meteors per hour with only modest moonlight.
Saturn is up all night at its biggest and brightest. The best ring-viewing window of 2026.
The closest, largest, brightest full moon of 2026.
No telescope required
Longest day of the year (Northern Hemisphere).
The smallest full moon of 2026 , a nice foil to November's supermoon.
Cluster together after midnight.
A steady southern shower.
Its best apparition of the year as the brilliant evening/morning star.
Two weeks after the total solar eclipse.
First of three straight supermoons.
A short, occasionally explosive shower best in the evening.
Fast meteors from the dust of Halley's Comet.
Overlapping the Nov 5 supermoon.
The third supermoon in a row.
Shortest day of the year.
A quiet way to close the year.
Some need binoculars or a scope
Best morning view.
Telescope required.
Up all night. Best ring-viewing window of 2026.
Best evening view.
Targets, dates slip
Launch Complex 1, New Zealand.
China's lander-rover-hopper bound for the lunar south pole to hunt for water ice in permanently shadowed craters.
ESA's follow-up surveys the crater NASA's DART mission punched in 2022.
Pending the LC-36 pad rebuild after the May test-stand explosion.
NASA's next great observatory. a Hubble-sharp camera with 100x the field of view, built to map dark energy and find thousands of exoplanets.
Regular cadence through the year.
Still worth marking on the page
Brightest of the year, in Gemini.
Antarctica.
Seen across the Americas and Pacific.
The first crewed flight around the Moon in over 50 years (Wiseman, Glover, Koch and CSA's Hansen).
Debris from Halley's Comet.
The only one of 2026.
China's first asteroid sample-return attempt. Samples due back late 2027.
The two brightest planets side by side at dusk.
The largest IPO on record.
Teasers for what's coming
Announced June 2026. Flies the dress rehearsal for the next Moon landing.
Its asteroid samples come back to Earth.
Toward Saturn's moon Titan.
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