Moon calendar for August 2026

Day by day

Key days of the month

August nights: the Perseids and real darkness

The Perseids carry August. They peak on the 12th and 13th, they behave in a way no other shower does, and by then the sky has finally gone properly dark again - through June and July, this far north, it never quite manages it. Sunset pulls back about ninety minutes across the four weeks, so the observing window widens fast. Overhead, the Milky Way runs from Cygnus down towards the southern horizon. Away from streetlights it is not subtle.

Sturgeon Moon

Sturgeon. The fish were at their easiest to catch in the Great Lakes at this point in the summer, and the full moon took its name from the season's work. The label is Algonquian, printed for a wider readership by the Maine Farmers' Almanac in the 1930s and never dislodged since. English tradition had its own names for the same moon - Grain Moon, Barley Moon - which describe what was happening in the fields rather than in the water.

What August asks

Two questions arrive every August. First, whether moonlight will spoil the Perseids: check the Light column above, and under about twenty per cent the faint meteors survive. Second, the blue moon, which people expect to be blue and which is only a second full moon inside one calendar month; the modern rule comes from a 1946 magazine article that misread the almanac, and it stuck anyway. Preserving, jam and haircut timing fill the rest of the postbag.

The Moon’s position is astronomy; the beliefs and interpretations are tradition, not scientific fact.