Events · August 19, 2026

The 28 August Lunar Eclipse: Western Europe Will Miss Half of It

On the morning of 28 August, the Earth's shadow will cover 96.6 % of the Moon. It is a partial eclipse so deep that at maximum only 6.2 % of the lunar diameter stays outside the shadow: a rim. From Western Europe, though, the whole scene plays out seven degrees above the western horizon, in a sky that is already brightening, and the Moon sets before it is over. From Cayenne it happens at 72 degrees, almost overhead, in full darkness. The same instant, the same shadow cone, and two events that have nothing in common.

What time is the lunar eclipse on 28 August 2026?

The times below are local to Paris (CEST). London, Dublin and Edinburgh are one hour earlier throughout: maximum falls at 05:12 there. The penumbral phase is not worth setting an alarm for, it is a shading so faint that the eye only notices it afterwards, on photographs. What counts begins at 04:33, when the Moon's eastern limb enters the true shadow.

The first hour is the good one. At 04:33 the Sun is 21 degrees below the horizon: it is still full night, and the Moon stands at 20 degrees, a comfortable height. After that everything degrades together, the Moon sinking while the sky brightens. At 06:12, at maximum, the Moon is at 7.7 degrees and the Sun at minus 7.7: the symmetry is a coincidence, but it sums up the difficulty. You will need a western horizon that is completely clear, with no hill, no building and no tree line.

Why Western Europe only sees half the eclipse

The partial phase lasts 3 h 19, from 04:33 to 07:52. But the Moon sets at 07:09. Paris therefore sees 2 h 37 of it and loses the last 42 minutes, which happen below the horizon. At the moment it disappears it is still 53 % eclipsed, heavily bitten. This is not an eclipse that ends, it is an eclipse that is taken away from you.

There is something stranger. The Sun rises at 07:01 and the Moon sets at 07:09: for eight minutes both bodies are above the horizon at once, with the Moon still inside the Earth's shadow. This is called a horizontal eclipse, or selenelion. The geometry is not a paradox: atmospheric refraction lifts both bodies near the horizon, which is enough to let them coexist for a few minutes. Actually seeing it is another matter, with a dimly lit Moon half a degree up in a sky that has just switched on. But it is there, and it is computed.

The same eclipse, fifteen places, fifteen different nights

A lunar eclipse has no path of totality: when the Moon is in the shadow, it is in the shadow for everyone at once. The bite is identical everywhere on Earth, to the second. What changes from one place to another is only the Moon's altitude above your horizon, and the orientation of the disc, which the parallactic angle rotates with latitude.

Two rows repay a careful read. Los Angeles technically gets the entire partial phase, but the first contact happens with the Moon only 3 degrees up, so the opening is effectively lost to the horizon. Vancouver is the mirror image: the eclipse starts before moonrise there, and the city catches the second half instead. Within Western Europe the spread is small and goes the other way from the usual: Edinburgh gets 7.4 degrees and Dublin 10.3, because the further west you are, the further the Moon is behind the Sun, so the higher it stands when the shadow reaches it. But all of that is trivial next to the Americas. This eclipse belongs to the western Atlantic.

How to watch a lunar eclipse

A lunar eclipse needs no protection at all. That is the whole difference with the solar eclipse of 12 August, where a single glance without a certified filter burned the retina. Here you are looking at the Moon, which merely returns a little light. Naked eye, no instrument, no precaution.

• Find the horizon first. In Western Europe it is the only real problem: at 7 degrees, a building 200 metres away is enough to hide everything. A west-facing shore, a ridge, a field, a rooftop car park.
• Go out around 04:30 Paris time (03:30 in the UK and Ireland), not at 06:00. The first half hour is when the Moon is high and the sky still black, and it is also when the bite grows fastest.
• Binoculars help a great deal, not for magnification but to separate the two brightnesses: the sunlit rim is dazzling next to the shadowed part, and the naked eye often sees nothing but the rim.
• Do not go looking for a red Moon. The copper tint of total eclipses comes from sunlight filtered through the whole of the Earth's atmosphere, and it only appears once the entire disc is inside the shadow. At 96.6 %, the 6 % still in sunlight overwhelms everything else.
• To photograph it, rest the phone on something solid and switch off night mode, which will blow out the rim and drown the shadowed part.

When is the next one that is actually worth watching?

This is the argument that decides whether you set an alarm. We went through every lunar eclipse up to 2030 and computed, for each one, its altitude above the Paris horizon at maximum. The next two are penumbral, so invisible. The one on 12 January 2028 is well placed at 33 degrees, but covers only 3 % of the disc. The one on 6 July 2028 happens below the horizon. The totals of 31 December 2028 and 26 June 2029 replay exactly today's problem: 100 % obscuration, but at 7 and 3 degrees of altitude. The next eclipse that is both deep and high from Paris, and by extension from Western Europe, is the one on 20 December 2029: total, at 61 degrees, in the middle of a winter night. Three years and four months. That puts seven degrees in perspective.

What these figures do not tell you

The times and altitudes are purely geometric. They contain no weather at all, and at 7 degrees of altitude the weather decides everything: a band of haze on the horizon, common at the end of a summer night, is enough to cancel the whole thing.

Altitudes are corrected for standard atmospheric refraction. Near the horizon, real refraction depends on temperature and pressure: allow a few tenths of a degree of uncertainty, which moves moonset by a few minutes.

Obscuration is a fraction of area, not a brightness. At 96.6 % the Moon stays easily visible to the naked eye: the uneclipsed rim is still hundreds of times brighter than the rest of the sky. The difference between 99 % and 100 % is not gradual, it is a difference in kind.

The shadow radius used here follows the classical convention, enlarged by 2 % to account for the Earth's atmosphere widening the cone. Depending on the convention chosen, the obscuration at maximum varies by two tenths of a point. It changes nothing about what you will see.

Finally, all of the above is computed for specific places. If you are somewhere else, the contact times are the same for you but the altitudes are not: the SkyChart sky map recomputes them for your position. And if you missed the other eclipse of this August, the solar one, we computed it city by city.

This article was translated from the French edition by AI, then reviewed before publication. The figures are not translated: times, altitudes and percentages are computed by SkyChart and are identical in both editions.

• Lunar eclipses