Moon calendar for October 2026

Day by day

Key days of the month

Clocks back, sky sharper

One shower a year is best watched before midnight, and it falls on the 8th: the Draconids, whose radiant stands highest in the evening rather than at dawn. The Orionids follow around the 21st, debris from Halley's comet, sparse but fast. All of it happens against a sky that improves as quickly as the daylight shrinks - nearly two hours gone across the month, plus the hour that comes off on the last Sunday, when the evening collapses in a single step. The Pleiades are up in the east by mid-evening.

Hunter's Moon - and the other Blood Moon

The moon after the Harvest Moon is the Hunter's Moon: fields stripped, cover gone, light enough to follow a trail well into the evening. Some old almanacs also list it as the Blood Moon, and that name causes trouble every autumn because people turn up expecting an eclipse. It refers to hunting and to the slaughter that came before winter, not to a red disc. An eclipsed moon does go copper, but that is a separate phenomenon with its own dates.

October's postbag

How often does Halloween land on a full moon? Roughly once in nineteen years, which is the Metonic cycle doing its work - the last was 2020 and the next falls in 2039. The clock change brings its own confusion: moonrise appears to jump backwards, though the Moon has only done its usual fifty-minute slide and the missing hour came off your side of the equation. Autumn planting and hair colour make up most of the remainder.

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